Well, I'd say it's Asus fault for having crappy firmware - but Linux triggers it - causing the card to permanently no longer come up on boot.

"Fried" was a poor choice of words - the device is dead - but it's due to firmware and probably something to do with sleep states.

I didn't mean to imply the radio was actually fried.

It'll be interesting to see what the technicians end up doing to get it working. It might be enough to disconnect the card and force some even deeper reset than a power cycle with drained laptop battery does - but as I still have valid guarantee on the machine, I stopped short of opening it up. Especially since I might need a new wifi card anyway.