GNOME Maps and the tile problem

The rendering is fairly easy to setup. The setting up of GIS aware database and importing the data set is a pain. In a previous life I had to implement tile rendering on an NMS system. The biggest problem was having to break up the OSM data dumps into reasonable sized chunks for each country. Importing the whole of the UK data-set would make our rather lightweight server chug away for a significant amount of time - I dread to think what it would do to a normal laptop.

Maybe the circle can be squared with having a public GIS web-service to supply the vector data but I suspect that still runs into the same problems of maintaining a web-service getting hammered for data with no monetary backing to keep it running.