"I see a Netgear appliance that seems to do the job pretty well for $150 -"
That looks good. These days, the probability is pretty high that appliance is running uCLinux, which doesn't do memory management and is pretty stripped down. With a meg or so of flash and 512k or so of RAM, you can run a pretty complex application with uCLinux. It has the advantage in that you can find programmers who are experienced in the environment and all of the protocols are available. One omy last projects when I was employed in the real world was implementing a commercial grade access point using Linux. We implemented most of the features of their older AP plus a bunch of new ones in 3 months with 5 people. Their previous project took 2 years and a team of 20. We could have implemented the balance of the features in another 6 months, but they killed the project...
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