I'm heavily leaning towards the laptop solution. I have an old hand me down laptop so I'm going to give this a try and see if it works the way I envision it. I've downloaded Topofusion too and am in the middle of downloading maps of socal. It's taking a long time but considering it's free I'm giving it my all and download the maps. Hopefully it won't be that bad
I may end up just picking up the delorme topo usa and the city streets map as it looks to be pretty good. I'm also considering trying ozi and ms streets. we'll see.
Gotta find me a cheap usb gps unit to plug into the laptop so that's my next goal.