I've spent most of today playing with the Google Maps API for a site I run in my spare time. It's actually very neat. While the performance isn't quite as instant as I'd like, creating polylines, points and markers is very easy.
Well, I say easy: the API itself is easy, but requires latitude and longitude for coordinates. There's no built in coordinate transformer or geocoder to get round this, so if you're looking to plug in coordinates, you have to use Streetmap to find the OS grid coordinates, then use its converter (hidden towards the bottom of the page) to switch to lat/long.
It's a shame the balloons are so big, otherwise they'd be a useful feature and since the icons are such a pain in the arse to create, thanks to browser issues, I won't be using them any time soon either. But as a quick way to create panning, zooming maps without browser plug-ins, there's nothing like it and I've already swapped out my Streetmap-derived mapping in favour of Google maps, leaving it as a fallback for accessibility purposes and to cater for older browsers.
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