Nowadays almost everyone has some kind of instant coffee machine in the room. It could be that free WiFi is the new marker for quickly delineating one from the other.
In an interesting twist, while a free continental breakfast will often be significantly lower quality than a paid higher-end breakfast, I've found that the free wifi is almost always significantly better than the paid wifi.
In fact, many business hotels have tiered wifi plans. And they all suck, even their most expensive plans will be worse than the Motel 8 down the street.
As for continental breakfast, sure it's not as good as some really good sit-down breakfast restaurant, but it's free and more importantly it's fast: you just go down to the lobby and either eat it there or grab some stuff and take it back to your room to munch on before you leave for the day. It's a big time-saver. Going to a separate restaurant and waiting for food to be made for you and delivered and then waiting and waiting and waiting for the waiter to bring you the check takes a lot of time.
I've been staying at places like Holiday Inn, Homewood Suites by Hilton, Country Inn & Suites, Courtyard, etc., which area all most certainly "hotels" and all of them have free Wifi.
The closest I've seen was a budget hotel where I stayed (not for work) after a huge party. The WiFi at that hotel was free, but it was heavily rate-limited and the rate-limits were lifted for a fee. You could use basic web pages, but Youtube wasn't possible without paying.
I've stayed in some nice hotels in the U.S. and in a wide variety of hotels internationally. The best "nice U.S. hotel wifi" would often rank around the average 3rd world "acceptable" hotel.
Agree - 5 star hotels have the worst. Clunky, shitty, login procedures and laugh out loud ridiculous pricing models.
This is similar to the situation for tourist visas in various countries. The shittiest countries that you absolutely would never want to overstay in have the most difficult to obtain visas. I once got a visa to go to bangladesh - it was expensive, took 2 months to get, and I still had to bribe 2 different people when I got to dhaka airport to get through.