> On more than one occasion, I ended up using a rocky tethered connection to my iPhone, retrying several times due to dropouts, to get Broadcom wifi drivers installed
Funny enough going off of this, I really like how with Android, it's really easy to share a Wi-Fi connection over USB to a computer, instead of having to use data. On more than one occasion myself, I've simply left an old android phone (that has no SIM card or data plan) attached to a computer to give it internet for months instead of buying a wifi card.