I find the maps they make really pretty, but the technical stuff doesn't quite deserve the hype. This seems like blue marble, which NASA did in 2005 (and every month since).

That said it should yield a dataset with twice the resolution of Blue Marble, which is cool. The size of a pixel will be 250m, i.e. a small town will be 2 pixel, as opposed to 1 pixel.

For high resolution imagery, you'd need to pay. There is 0.5m data out there, for about $5+ a kilometer, and I'd love NASA to dump a whole world data-set of this. But until then, I think Google and ESRI are safe.

VERY LARGE FILE http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/73000/7375... NASA's blue marble.