> The default wifi in almost all of the laptops and netbooks of the time sucked. It wasn't unique to netbooks.
Not really. Proper laptops had intel centrino wifi which worked decently well with binary blobs and atheros cards needed no binary blob at all and worked out of the box.
The iwlwifi contrib drivers still require manual installation. It's about the license model. I used to have an external Atheros just to set up my other NICs (internal and external). It wasn't great for much other than that.