Yuppie compass or useful tool?

Arkansas was terra incognita for Maria and for me when she moved down here to start her new job last September.
I suggested we get her a GPS unit to help her find her way around, but she declined in favor of maps and a compass.
While many of my BMW-riding friends adopted GPS years ago, I've been a holdout, waiting for the technology to mature and for prices to drop. Earlier GPS units had less memory capacity and a greater dependence upon a computer link to choose and download map data for just the part of the country where the user planned to go.
Now, even the cheaper units come loaded with mapping and point of interest data for the 48 contiguous states.
Still, I held out.
Then we drove to Mountain View, Ark., a few weekends ago in a convoy with Maria's daughter and the daughter's boyfriend. While most of northeast Arkansas is flat with a fairly predictable road grid - the sole exception being Crowley's Ridge - western and northwest Arkansas is mountainous with an amazing hodge-podge of state and federal highways involved in any long drive.
We got along fine with our map on that trip, but it occurred to me it would be a whole lot easier and more fun to have a GPS voice give me a heads-up in advance of every route change. And, I must admit, I used computer mapping software to work out the most direct route.
Circuit City is blowing out a lot of stuff and they had the Garmin 200W on sale at a reasonable price over the weekend.
Besides, we both figured I needed a little retail therapy for my shingles discomfort.
So a day later, I can say I'm impressed. Yes, there are places that don't show up in the Points of Interest lists that I think should be there and no, it's nowhere near as flexible and sophisticated as the new Dash Express that I blogged about a week or two ago. It doesn't know about our little county sideroad. It was very short on documentation - just a fast and dirty Quick Start guide and so far, I've found nothing more detailed on the Garmin website. I did, however, download and install the latest 4 GB update and it seems a bit smarter than it was straight out of the box.
This thing will doubtless prove useful as we explore our new home state and we hope it will save us a few gas dollars by always showing us the shortest route. That is, if I don't burn up gas just driving around and playing with it.