Ubiquitous computing at the MIT Media Lab -- I saw a great presentation on this a couple years ago by Joe Paradiso. Their idea was also to embed networked computers in power strips as a hub for everything else to communicate through. It's called the Plug on this page.
Unfortunately, my experience seems to be that very few wireless manufacturers are really willing to make their hardware "open." This problem seems to have hit OpenMoko as well; I'm guessing this is why they don't have 3G.