Offline Google Maps in the next iteration of Android would mean that you could download the maps offline for the area you usually travel to/around and be able to use it as a GPS (not sure how the new offline maps would work w.r.t. re-routing and all that)
Offline Google Maps in the next iteration of Android
This is actually in the next iteration of maps...or rather the last iteration as it was released yesterday. If you upgrade Maps on an Android device, you get this functionality.
The mapping application is simply an app, having been decoupled from the OS back in, I think, 2.3? The labs functionality for offline access has been around for a while, but has been baked into the core app now.
The point being that it isn't an 2.3, 3.0, 4.0, or 4.1 feature. It's a Google Maps feature.
