Hardware can actually be a mixed bag between BSD and Linux. In my experience (which is several years dated by now), BSDs seemed to do better with various less popular WiFi chipsets.
I remember having trouble with wifi chipsets ~5-6 years ago when smaller netbooks started to hit the scene. I had one of thous, like 8" laptops with brand new ARM chip and 4 hour battery life, for it getting wifi working was hard, but after that I haven't had much trouble with wifi, but maybe I've just been lucky.