I have the "big brother" to the Legend - the Vista. The main difference is it has more memory AFAIK.

The base map will give you a decent overview on the roads, but as indicated, not smaller roads or rural detail.

While 8MB isn't as much as you could hope for, road maps don't take much space and it will hold a decent bit of road maps. A couple of counties in most places. If you stick to one area pretty well, it might be enough.

The real power of this unit is to use the downloaded maps. Keep in mind that the price for these maps is fixed for the Garmin units. For example, if you buy the road software ... It is $100. Doesn't matter what model you have.

The thing to keep in mind is that you can also download topos. This is very useful when hiking. The 8MB will be enough for normal hiking areas. However, the topos take up much more memory than the road maps so you aren't going to save a large area. Again, the topo software is going to run you something like $100.

Also keep in mind the downloadable maps are in a propriatery format so you can only buy them from Garmin. You can get free software to manage waypoints and routes, and other mapping software will allow you to manage waypoints and routes over their maps, but only the routes and waypoints can be transfered, not the maps. This also means you aren't going to find a good deal on the Garmin software.

Also keep in mind that this unit will have trouble keeping locked to sattelites in heavy folliage like here in the pacific northwest. All GPSes will have this issue to a certain extent, but without an antenna that can be oriented, it typically is a bit worse. I noticed this when going from my GPS III+ to the Vista. The GPS III+ has an antenna that you can stick out of the holster and rotate towards the sky. The GPS III+ keeps singnal better under the trees, but the Vista has a much nicer screen and more memory. If I was going to have any Garmin I wanted, it would be a GPS 60CS or a GPS V specifically for the antenna. You can also get this issue in the city with tall buildings.

That said, typically you can get a signal by stopping, and holding the unit where it gets the best view of the sky and waiting. If you needed you could search for a more clear area or climb a tree.

So, I think it comes down to what you want to do with it. Having the base maps are much better than not having any maps at all, but I really feel the value is when you download the detailed maps. If you want something for use on hiking trips and you can download the maps ahead of time, it will work just fine. If you want something that you can populate detailed maps for an entire state -- no joy.

All in all, I think Garmin makes very nice mapping GPSes. I like my Vista and think the Legend would be good as long it has enough memory for your use.

-john