I noticed when using the Hydra theme there was an issue with the GMap module unable to render a map. This issue was theme specific:

Hydra did it's print $scripts in page.tpl.php in the closure area. Moving this to the header area alleviated the problem.

I'm leaving this post here as a marker for anyone else who comes across this problem, either with this theme/module pair or as a possible troubleshoot to a similar "Javascript is required to view this map" problem.