Almost every Raspberry Pi project I have encountered needs some sort of connectivity and doing this with 3rd party dongles (some don't even work on most recent versions of Raspbian) is just ridiculous in my opinion.
There is a compromise of putting a port on the thing where a locally puchased wifi dongle could be installed. The port would have to provide power and be fast enough to be wifi usable. It would be really nice if that port were popular. The Pi People seem to like community building and a USA distributor could bundle a USA FCC certified wifi adapter with every board, just plug it in. That port is called the USB port. So the solution to various implementation problems devolves into the current situation.