Not everything's business-model driven, especially things not relying on a central server, or not on frequent communication to that server (like the calendar service noted above). It's not a free lunch; some of us pay for it by coding, and others by putting up with RTFM!, etc. Think of it as a community-funded lunch.
No. It isn't. Take the examples above: Almost all of them can be used for free with the current infrastructure. It's a matter of software, not databases. Wikipedia is a high quality source of location based information and is free. XMPP-based chat services can exchange the locations of users for free, all we need is a client that goes 'beep' when someone's near you. (I live in Europe, too, and I know quite a lot of people who'd get excited about this.) So what we don't yet have (or do we? I don't know) is the free database for shops and cash machines. Such a database would be much easier to create than a complex project like, say, openstreetmap, so I'm very confident it will be available once people see the need for it.. (I mean, geourl even sorts websites by location, why wouldn't someone come up with "yellow pages" in wiki-style with latitude/longitude?)