Well, yes and no.
There's the OS New Popular Edition which has been scanned and
georeferenced and is also available as a web service ; see
http://www.npemap.org.uk/ Also for download / supply on disc if you
ask nicely.
Most other historical OS is being marketed through Landmark as
'enhanced' product, allowing the OS to make money out of it as a new
publication despite it being out of copyright. There are increasingly
small pools of data where interested individuals are scanning the
original (out of copyright) sheets and putting them online; see
http://www.hipkiss.org/cgi-bin/maps.pl for example.
LiDAR is not free unless you happen to know someone with a system.
University of Cambridge have one as do QinetiQ. I've worked with
Cambridge data and seen the QinetiQ chaps demo their data (incredible
resolution, but then they flew at a very low level) but the
Environment Agency are the main supplier and their data is only
available free to local authorities doing flood plain work. Of course,
you can buy the data; see
http://www.geomatics-group.co.uk/lidar.html
If you're interested more in getting some data for testing purposes,
US lidar data is centrally indexed and is available for download with
loads of useful resources: see
http://lidar.cr.usgs.gov/ Also, most
lidar is supplied in processed raster format, at least here in the UK;
I haven't seen anything in LAS format apart from it being discussed as
a useful format for laser scan data in the Heritage3D project.
You can get various satellite datasets for free. BlueMarble's data is
available as a (legit) torrent and SRTM data is also available;
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/
If you're looking to build a (publicly accessible) website, modern OS
is available for free through the OS OpenSpace project, serving up
data in a googlemaps fashion via web services.
The Open Street Map project is also providing free basemapping as web
services.
atb,
P :-)