Use Sarge or Sid and have the wireless card in place (try and have as much of the hardware you will use in place, printers etc...).
I have had no problems with Prism2 chipsets and essid "any"
Ubuntu is very wireless friendly and now there is Kubuntu, both based on Debian.
google is your friend.
Good luck!

More info,
For the Sarge net install image and more -
www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
(Woody would work but why?)
Trove of info (good outfit as well).
wiki.personaltelco.net/index....lessFaq

There is some support (unstable) for the newer TI chipsets (like the D-Link I want to throw out a window) but it's pretty bad when dmesg taunts you for trying it :) Stay away (for now... ). I have had success with Avaya (world card gold, "b") and Netgear (WG511, "g"). The Avaya is a Prism2 chipset and the Netgear is a Prism54 chipset. IMHO "g" support is limited to a handful of cards and can be a real bitch (not to say not worth it, just a pain).

"b" is less expensive (but not by much for commodity gear) than "g" so that might be a factor as well.

I have a Dell Latitude C610, and I am running Debian. I am using an Orinoco pc wireless card, and it works fine. I also had a usb wireless stick working too, both are prism2 based chips.

The only issues I had was the mouse touch pad. In gnome I had trouble finding support for it. It would mysteriously start traveling, but under kde, there is some software, the name escapes me, to handle it and I have sense become a kde convert.

Otherwise, I have had only good experiences. Good luck.