Reversing their decision meant for many, either spending a few sleepless nights struggling to undo their changes or wait for feature parity.
I waited, for me the time to spend nights tweaking Linux distributions is somehow gone at the turn of the century. Nowadays, either it works out of the box, or I don't care.
The Intel drivers require blobs. Broadcom used to require blobs that you had to cut out of Windows drivers yourself, though I have no idea what that's like now.
The vendors use the excuse that this stuff requires FCC certification, and if they expose the low-level stuff some hax0rs will turn the wi-fi portion of the spectrum into CB radio circa 1979.
The OpenBSD guys used to recommend Atheros, because the specs were open. I have no idea what the current wisdom is. I run Thinkpads, which are BIOS-locked to only Lenovo provided cards, so I've been in iwl-land for a long time.
Ralink used to provide documentation on request. They've been acquired by Mediatek since. Mediatek allows OpenBSD to distribute binary firmware images under free terms (for the run(4) driver). Perhaps they'd still provide docs. I haven't asked yet.
Realtek's engineers tend to be kind and helpful, but they don't provide docs on request, citing NDAs, and management has ignored my requests. There are several open source drivers for Linux written by Realtek engineers which can be used as a reference but they are pretty large so studying them takes time.
Broadcom's open source drivers are unreadable to the point of being more or less equivalent to binary blobs. If you want to see why try to make sense of this file in Linux: drivers/netwireless/brcm80211/brcmsmac/phy/phy_n.c
I know that's a pretty common occurrence of thinkpads, but I hadn't heard one that was strictly manufacture specific. Most thinkpads i've encountered are "Use Intel 5400AGN OR Broadcom'blahblahblah',not 'Use Intel Only', and all of those thinkpads i've experienced that with have had BIOS reflash available to work around that particular problem.
p.s. this message isn't intended for snark, it's intended to allow me to skip whichever thinkpad it is that's locked down. My bets are on one of the thin cant-take-the-battery-out ultrabook 'ThinkPads', but we'll see!
The result is that my system uses 1.5W more than if I ran OS X. Otherwise, I have very good power consumption, so it doesn't have an impact on overall battery range. But very annoying.
Maybe I should just spend some more time learning about wireless and see if I can hack on wicd or create something new rather than just mourning its loss.