For what it's worth, I spent some time playing with a pair of Airport Extreme AP's and a pair of D-Link 2100AP's. The D-Link product is part of their "108G" line.
The 2100's are supposed to support WDS (as advertised) but the documentation is very thin. In the end, I was able to get WDS working to form a wireless bridge with them and host client devices at the same time. The D-Link units also worked fine with my PowerBook 12".
I didn't do any testing that revealed the "greater than G" behavior of the D-Link product. I will only be doing large file transfers over the bridge so that's the only segment that I benchmarked. The distance in question is between the basement of my house and one of my upstairs bedrooms (2 floors away). Obviously the distance is not terribly far but there are a lot of obstacles. With 128 bit WEP activated, I was able to sustain 2400+MB/s using the Apple products and 2100+MB/s with the D-Link.
Interestingly, I was able to set up a mixed multipoint WDS network with the AP's using both the Apple and D-Link as the master AP. For some reason, when I mixed the 2 brands of AP via WDS I was only able to sustain ~1500-1800MB/s data transfers across my bridge. That was disappointing, but I was kinda surprised that worked at all.
In the end I am keeping the Apple AP's. The clear documentation, ease of setup, and rock solid functionality won out. The nice looks didn't hurt either. The only problem I have is that my wife knows how much more expensive they are. Oh well, I never said I was cheap to keep around!
My guess is that the D-Link products might have performed better at a closer range but it didn't impact my situation.
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