I'm my crazy vision, first you do some "pairing" of the network boxes. (Perhaps you buy a set of them, pre-paired from the factory.) At that point, you plug them in and they do WDS by default unless they happen to notice that they're connected by a wire. Ahh, then let's use the wire. This should be automatic.

Cost is an interesting thing. To pick on one vendor, a D-Link DAP-1522, introduced in May 2009 and still for sale, has a four port gigabit switch and a built-in access point. It presently costs $72 (at NewEgg). So far as I can tell, nobody else builds a product anything like it. D-Link routers, often with far more capable hardware, cost roughly the same. Why? Volume.

Presumably, the one-box-for-everybody solution wouldn't need to be any more expensive than any of these other router boxes. It would just need a serious overhaul of the software to target painless usability for more sophisticated configurations.

If there's one thing that people around here can agree on, it's that quality software makes all the difference in the world. And the firms building these routers, with the perhaps notable exception of Apple, aren't particularly known for software quality.

Anyway... random thoughts for the day.