There's an awkward dance between access point and Wi-Fi adapters: A Wi-Fi adapter is full of 1999 and 2002 technology; Wi-Fi access points, enterprise WLAN switches, and gateways have the latest goodness. How can the industry add features to adapters that allow them to be as smart and manageable as the AP side? A new IEEE standard, of course.
802.11v will allow configuration, diagnostics, and dynamic adaptation of settings. Those will all allow enterprises to save enormous amounts of time in provisioning devices--although some end-point security tools can already handle some of this--and troubleshooting. The dynamic changes in settings would allow devices to respond to network conditions or control signals sent via an access point to an adapter.
Most importantly, perhaps, adapters could participate in load balancing among access points, eliminating kludges by WLAN vendors that push and pull adapters to the APs they want them on.