The intention seems to be that OS mapping will be freely available online from, erm, off the top of my head, August, I think, this year. It's not quite clear what that means for mapping software companies as far as I can see.
So mapping will be on the web and free to use, which means route planning sites will be pretty much doing what mapping software already does, but free - then again, those sites exist anyway, albeit under a confusing OS licencing system, which means that they sometime simply serve all the tiles they're entitled to serve and stop working.
So yes, route planning you should be able to do for free using web sites, but as I understand it, if you want OS mapping stored on your mobile GPS unit, the situation would be unchanged. Phones with a data connection, could use web mapping for free, but then you'd be dependant on having a good connection, which is unlikely to happen in most mountain areas.
The grey bit, I think, will be apps and so on that cache OS mapping tiles for use later. The RouteBuddy Atlas app will already do that with Open Streetmap mapping, which is free and on the web, so you can download mapping and store it temporarily for use on the hill.
I'm guessing that the OS will not allow this under its licence terms, but you can see the potential.
I think it puts an onus on mapping software specialists to up their game and produce software that's so good, it gives significant advantages over free web sites.
It'll be interesting to see what happens.
I'm going to do a quick article about the burgeoning OS-mapping for iPhone situation soon by the way - there's a fair bit of choice with more appearing all the time, though the existing apps are all quite basic in terms of functionality, so there's a definite opportunity for the likes of Anquet, Memory Map and ViewRanger to produce a more sophisticaed bit of software.
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