Wireless in any *nix is going to be iffy and not very good, simply because there's not enough folk in the linux world working on wireless *and* the wireless hardware manufacturers aren't helping one iota, so the few linux dev's working on wireless are forced to do everything by baby steps. It's a shame, but that's just the way it is at present.
-- “Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.” -John v. Lindsey
On PCLinuxOS, if the very few cases where the wireless can't work with the native drivers, which are all included stock, even for non-free ones, you can use your Windows driver with ndiswrapper. It even has a wizard in the Control Center to guide the user to choose either a native driver or one of the included Windows drivers for ndiswrapper. If your driver is not in the list, you can provide your own Windows driver. On every PCLinuxOS computers I tried, Wi-Fi was rock solid, as reliable as wired ethernet, and this on a wide variety of networks.
This is a case where a distro that has comprehensive hardware support and config tools is important.
-Alexandre