Reports are coming in from all over about Intel's breakthrough Wi-Fi chip design: But when you read a technical report, linked here, it's a not-yet-commercial design that simply demonstrates Intel's ability to incorporate 802.11a, b, g, and n within the same sort of flexible chip manufacturing process--CMOS--used for the largest wafer formats and highest yields. It's not that it's not interesting, but it's not yet a big deal given that 802.11n won't be finalized until what's looking like early 2007, and other chipsets already offer a/b/g in CMOS at low power.
The most important thing about this announcement, imo, is that it shows progress on the roadmap to utilize the latest Silicon on Insulator sub-micron CMOS processes.. the same as being used for high volume Pentium and Pentium 64 production ICs.
The long term roadmap for radios is to do more multi-mode and multi input-output and multiple signal processing needed to provide features such as 'seamless roaming' and MIMO-AAS. This also is the trend for lowering costs. On the roadmap is cognitive/agile radios and eventually multiple spectrum radios - radios that can operate over more than one spectrum or system simultaneously. For anytime soon that is a tall order. Put the wasy to get there is to be able to build chips using high isolation, high speed, but low cost processes such as SoI and show that difficult functions such as on-chip amps can be compbined with sensitive signal I/O and processing sections.