Might I ask if you did the small research before taking the plunge with your wireless card? Due to the manufacturers *not* releasing specs on the card chipsets, the linux world is having to reverse engineer them. It's getting better every day, but it's a fact that wireless is a bit of a pain. You're better off going and buying a "good" card (one everyone knows that works) rather than wasting time -- leave that to the hackers, and in a year they'll have it working.
I'm sorry you had such a bad experience -- but there are a *lot* that go the other way. I can't speak for Ubuntu, but if you grab an off-the-shelf ThinkPad T43 and install Fedora Core on it, everything just works right out of the box - except wireless, but a single one-file download is all you need to enable it. As do many other systems I run (primarily Dell hardware), everything just works -- mainly because I've spent the time making sure the hardware is friendly with my chosen platform.
Maybe you'll try again some other day and have better luck. This BB device is the first piece of hardware I've actually had to spend time on to get working with linux in a really long time, and it's primarily because of how RIM had designed it and not released specs. Go figure.
A lot of companies are stuck in the dark ages and don't realize yet that supporting linux as a platform actually helps their bottom line in roundabout ways.