So for those of you who live in the US, congrats.

The situation in my area is nowhere near as good. I've got a couple Garmin GPSes as well as a GPS capable phone, and I would just love to map every road and path in a 100km radius from home. Unfortunately all the mapping software I've tried is so horribly slow I'd have to buy a new computer to be able to do much at all with the data I can collect.

Mapping software?

I thought OSM was mainly edited on the web, right at http://www.openstreetmap.org/traces is where you can upload your GPS traces for instance.

Yes, the web editor is called iD. It is software. It is slow.

You could try the JOSM editor[1], but iD is about as lightweight as it gets, so I am not sure if it would be much better. For what its worth, I use iD regularly without performance issues, but YMMV on older machines. Unfortunately, vector rendering and editing will tend to push browsers to their limit. This may be alleviated somewhat by the use of WebGL in coming years.

[1] https://josm.openstreetmap.de/

iD lightweight? It has trouble rendering a good block of houses when there is a lot of data whereas josm only gets into trouble rendering a small city or so of equally dense data.

You can open an issue here with details about where this occurs and your browser/machine details: https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD

Or send them to me and I will enter the issue.. I'm a collaborator on that project.