I think a good approach is to use the best of both worlds. I am very much a Luddite and have recently got a smart phone which is a serious weapon. You not only have google earth, but you have google earth with you on it, if you use google maps, you can do the same and correlate that with your clipboard. Bgs have igeology, which is fantastic. Again, you can have you on it, click a button and in a lazy manner, figure out your likely bore hole conditions. This would take a load of time and cross referencing with a map, or applying a load of learned material.
I do like looking at historic material and if you load everything into gis, it loses something, however, if it's merely a tool, there is no place for reminiscence and out of date, slow and costly methods.