I think most people who use a GPS use it to establish their position on the printed chart.
That is the most sensible simple way to go about it.
The next best thing is to have the "printed" chart running as a GPS moving map. This capability has been about only recently (mostly due to map copyright issues, etc) but now there are numerous products which will give you that. Then you never need to actually look at the paper chart (I have that "system" for the whole of Europe, and the printed charts stay on the back seat, and in some cases I will carry only small sections of them, printed off as required).
The next stage is to run a GPS moving map which shows the ground and the airspace as dynamically generated shapes. This is what the old "aviation" GPSs do (again for historical reasons to do with Jeppesen effectively owning the databases) but IMHO most of the traditional ones (e.g. Garmin 496) are rubbish at it, with loads of clutter and no easy way to see the vertical airspace extents, especially on a small screen. The newer programs (PocketFMS, Skydemon) do this a lot better, but it works well only with a reasonable size screen, say 8" diagonal.
But regardless of how you actually navigate enroute, there really is no reason not to use a computer to knock up the plog, pre-flight. I have been using goode olde Navbox Pro for that, ever since the day I got my PPL in 2001. It is simple, has near-useless map representations (no good as a GPS moving map, although it will do that too) but does the job fine, and has a very good European coverage, with good airport info obtainable by clicking on the airport (phone numbers, etc).