I agree with Fuji Abound. Time to move to the 20th century.
FlyingForFun:
"When the resolution of the screen is sufficient to show me the same details as my 1/2-million scale map..."
I think you have a deep mis-understanding of how GPS is used for real navigation.
You CAN get what you want. You just need the right sort of GPS. Not the piece of junk from the local camping accessories shop, which no doubt is what the mostly-rubbish content of CAA "safety" sense leaflet #25 is based on, not to mention the views of most of the old guard of the anti-GPS Kremlin.
The reason most GPSs don't display the printed-chart data is nothing to do with GPS. It is to do with the tight grip on copyright (and the desire for royalties) which exists within the Peoples Republic of Europe, ably assisted by the UK CAA and every other CAA in these parts.
If you want a GPS that shows the CAA charts (in fact potentially up to 1 year less out of date than the paper ones, but I am going to be charitable today) then you can buy Memory Map
www.memory-map.co.uk and run it on a pocket/pc PDA, or a Tablet PC. You will end up with a fantastic big-screen GPS which blows away every "aviation" GPS on the market for VFR presentation. And if you go for a Tablet PC like this
http://www.motioncomputing.com/produ...blet_pc_ls.asp for example then you can also run a decent flight planning program like Navbox and you can chuck away the slide rule too. Not a £100 solution, but good things never are dirt cheap.
I chucked away my slide rule the day I passed the PPL skills test. Good riddance. IFR navigation is the way forward, regardless of the rules one is flying under.
Unfortunately MM doesn't provide charts for outside the UK (I suspect their marketing man is still having counselling after signing the cheques to the CAA for the use of "their" data) but there are ways to do the same trick for the whole area for which the Jepp 1:500k VFR/GPS charts are available, basically all the way down and across Italy. You can get this on the 28-day update cycle, too. But if, like most PPLs, you never fly outside the UK, this isn't relevant.
There are even ways to do it very cheaply, if you are into "sharing" of map data
The reason the Garmins etc don't provide decent VFR maps for Europe is because they can't get them. Not in digital vector form, which is what is needed. So they all license the rather bare vector database from Jeppesen which holds the monopoly on all this stuff. That database is uniform for everywhere.
In reality, existing GPS databases are not a problem because (for VFR) one uses the printed chart for planning anyway. The route is then loaded into the GPS, where it is displayed against the map. During the flight, the GPS just presents the primary reference track line. So there is no great need for every last bit of detail.
If the CAA really wanted to get a grip on the apparently rising CAS infringements issue, they would approach this whole subject properly. They could start by making their map data available free of charge.
Girlz always have problems with rotating maps anyway