The situation of the availability and cost of geospatial data varies greatly from one country to the next. The data is relatively free and available in the US as it's gathered as part of the US Census Bureau. However in countries like the UK it already is very expensive for these POI's and road data.
There is already a project working to build a free and complete map of the world called OpenStreetMap, or OSM, (http://openstreetmap.com). It is on track to finish the UK by 2008, and has good coverage in many other countries. AND (a data company like Navteq) donated their Netherlands data to OSM, seeing that the future business is not in private data, but building quality services on top of free and open data.
Commenting by HaloScan
