Go figure. I burn several days trying to figure out screen scraping so I can do a Google Maps mashup . . . and then Google introduces MyMaps, which allows people to create and share their own customized maps without all that complicated Javascript API coding. Here's mine, for example.
Don't get me wrong-- I think this is very empowering for the average end user who doesn't have the time, skillset or web hosting resources to do their own mashups. But if you want to do something cool and interesting with publicly available data found elsewhere on the World Wide Web, you are still going to need to go the screen scrape or API/Javascript route.