1. FCC Licensing: There is an issue with FCC licensing in that you have to make sure your equipment has proper shielding, broadcasts in the right frequencies, etc. As long as the thing is considered one unit physically, even if the radio parts aren't yours and were already certified, it still has to be certified. Laptop manufacturers can get away without it by having the wireless card be a separate board that plugs into a slot under the laptop. Could Raspberry Pi do the same? Perhaps, but that's still a change of design, possible extra costs in design/layout, software, and parts.
2. Software: As anyone who's used linux for over a few years can attest, much of the firmware of wifi chips are a sort of black box and making software to work with a given chip is a nightmare unless you are working with the manufacturer. Why they didn't partner with a particular chipset manufacturer could boil down to price. They got lucky with the cheap licensing for the CPU and perhaps couldn't get something similar with wifi or didn't feel that it was worth the effort for all the extra space, cost, and design issues for this first version.
1. FCC Licensing: There is an issue with FCC licensing in that you have to make sure your equipment has proper shielding, broadcasts in the right frequencies, etc. As long as the thing is considered one unit physically, even if the radio parts aren't yours and were already certified, it still has to be certified. Laptop manufacturers can get away without it by having the wireless card be a separate board that plugs into a slot under the laptop. Could Raspberry Pi do the same? Perhaps, but that's still a change of design, possible extra costs in design/layout, software, and parts.
2. Software: As anyone who's used linux for over a few years can attest, much of the firmware of wifi chips are a sort of black box and making software to work with a given chip is a nightmare unless you are working with the manufacturer. Why they didn't partner with a particular chipset manufacturer could boil down to price. They got lucky with the cheap licensing for the CPU and perhaps couldn't get something similar with wifi or didn't feel that it was worth the effort for all the extra space, cost, and design issues for this first version.