iWork (the successor to AppleWorks) offers simple geometric drawing tools inside both Pages and Keynote (and probably Numbers, but I rarely need to use Numbers so I can't recall).
I've made basic maps with both of those. I make a snapshot of the Google Maps illustration, then draw right over it in Pages to create a simplified version, then delete the Google map "background."
If I needed something more elaborate than what Pages offers me, I would reach for something like
WouldjaDraw -- lovely vector drawing program for cheap. There's also
InTaglio as a poor man's Adobe Illustrator. The latter is more expensive than the former, but Intaglio does a great job of correctly importing Appleworks/ClarisWorks/MacDraw II files, which is both rare to find and vitally important for artists who've waited too long to convert their old files.
AppleWorks continues to work in Snow Leopard, but you are wise to start moving away from it -- I get all kinds of horror stories about how its format can't really be used by anything else without a lot of conversion hassle. Best to start exporting to standard graphics formats now.
