Weird. I'd been assuming it had WiFi...been a while since I'd read the specs. That makes it much less useful, IMHO, though I still like the low power nature of the device. But you can get many more powerful android devices for about $70 that have WiFi, more ram, multiple cores, and more expansion options. Not to say I won't buy one, just that I won't buy a bunch of them, since WiFi is absolutely vital for the home automation projects I had in mind.

It has USB, so you can stick a small USB wifi device on it.

That doesn't make sense to me, I mean they can sell usb wifi dongles for less than $10, presumably profitably, so I would presume they could add wifi to the RP board for pretty cheap. What am I missing?

Probably that they're still trying to make it under $35 and get it out the door. Keep in mind that this is technically their first model, they probably wanted to keep things simple for a first release.

You can easily add wifi using this $10 dongle: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005CLMJLU (according to the rpi forums, it works out of the box with current kernels)

Wouldn't they also have to submit it for regulatory approval if they included wifi?

ethernet is relatively stable, whereas new wireless protocols and upgrades come out all the time. I would rather have wireless through usb or as a component of a daughterboard via the onboard bus, than soldered onto the board.

>ethernet is relatively stable, whereas new wireless protocols and upgrades come out all the time

I can't really agree with this line of thought:

802.11a - 1999 (5GHz)

802.11b - 1999 (2.4GHz)

802.11g - 2003 (2.4GHz)

802.11n - 2009 (2.4GHz + 5GHz)

802.11ac - 2012 (5GHz)

The only new standard on the immediate horizon is 802.11ac, and that's targeted strictly at the 5GHz band. Additionally, all the 2.4GHz stuff is backwards compatible all the way back to the old 802.11b standard.

Things certainly change, but it's more in the range of once every 4-5 years than it is all the time. There are good reasons not to include wifi on-board on the pi, but I don't see that as being one of them.

Getting CE/FCC approval for wifi is expensive and time consuming.

It also normally requires you to either get emmisions tests for the complete system or you can use a separate WIFI module - which is why most laptops have wifi on mini-pci cards.

Of course if you want to make a no-name $5 usb wifi dongle and just print CE on it that's a lot cheaper.