I have been looking at the Google Maps things lately and they appear to be using Mercator as the default projection, which is quite unfortunate as the Mercator projection is a navigation projection and not well suited for general use. (As an aside, Mercator-projection maps are popular only because there was a large surplus of them at the end of WWII and they made their way into schools because they were very cheap to obtain).

At first glance it appears that there might be a way to use different projections, but I need to look at the whole area in more detail in my copious free time.