One of my favorite deployments of it was to make a router out of a laptop - and use two of the xircom realport "mating" cards to give the laptop two real rj45 ports without any dongles:
https://www.premisesnetworks.com/doc/pc-card-0008
... combine that with an already existing rj45 on the laptop and you had a three-port gateway with a built-in KVM and a built-in UPS.
It's a bit of a shame that ExpressCard never got traction. I've had mixed success with USB Ethernet compared to the old PC-Card Ethernet.
To be fair they did change the name of the standard to PC Card - people just kept using the old name anyways.
Express Card made the mistake of offering multiple form factors which made it harder for laptop manufacturers to support.
This may change thanks to USB 4 (and Thunderbolt) being able to directly use PCIe lanes.
And then having to do some ndis wrapper fun with linksys or intel cards. Wow.
And even then, no packet injection!
Orinoco was one of those words that just stood out as it wasn't that common of a word in my daily vocabulary. Not needing to talk about rivers in South America, the only familiarity I had was from the Enya song. Everytime I'd insert the card into the slot, I'd sing "Sail away sail away" in my head.