Thanks Arjuna, this is a very interesting development. And there is something quite not right about this announcement. Wikimapia maps are derived from data given by google through its api. The derived data inherits google copyright and is not cc-by-sa compatible. Moreover, the blog mentions the data is under cc-by-sa, but I dont think there is any mechanism to download the map data from wikimapia. I'm going to raise this on the openstreetmap mailing lists to figure out if this is legal.

It seems to me that this is not, but will update you guys after I dig a little more.

-Arun