I've always been of the impression that Google Site Maps are of most benefit to websites that do not already have a well thought out site navigation. If a site's navigation and menus are well thought out using text links and the TITLE attribute, the value of Google Site Maps is greatly diminished.
The problem with Google Site Maps is that it is only useful to Google. Having a link to a "site directory" can also help users. From an usability and SEO standpoint, however, one would be better off using a well thought out and very comprehensive site navigation and menu layout that doesn't require the need for a separate set of navigation instructions.
Personally, I usually develop my site navigation around a primary, secondary and tertiary page categorization system. All primary pages are linked to by all pages of the website. A group of secondary pages tend to get linked to by their group's primary page and other related pages where appropriate. A group of tertiary pages get link to by their group's secondary page and other pages where appropriate. It is almost like the branches of a tree.
An example of this is my environmental chemistry website, which is a mix of topic specific articles and data resources like a chemical database and periodic table of elements. Right now, all articles are considered primary pages and are linked to by all other pages via a right-hand vertical navigation bar. Data resources like my periodic table of elements and chemical database each have a primary page that is linked to by all other pages, which acts like a section directory. In the case of the periodic table of elements, the first page of all element pages are linked to by the main periodic table page and all element pages are cross linked to each other via a tiny search engine friendly client side image map on the right hand menu. In the case of the chemical database, it is way too large (~25,000 chemicals) to link to all chemicals from the primary page for this section. So instead the primary chemical database navigation page links to secondary pages that break the chemicals down into alphabetically sub-lists that then link to each individual chemical (tertiary pages).
Using this system, any user or search engine bot can reach any page on the site within three clicks, with the most important pages (including all articles) never being more than one click away. This not only helps make the site easy to index by search engine bots, but also makes it more usable by human readers, which in turn encourages them to spend more time at the site reading more articles.
On small sites (e.g. <50 pages) I skip my primary, secondary, tertiary system above and simply link all pages to all pages. This makes any page on a site only one click away for users regardless of where they are on the site. If a side menu gets too long, I may use a JavaScript free DHTML menu to allow the menu to collapse some sections. Now granted older browsers don't support DHTML properly so I design the menu to fail to an expanded state.
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