I just stumbled over this article: http://lwn.net/Articles/456762/ from August, 2011
The dispute is unnecessary, but more GPL'ed code, definitely leads to a more diverse hardware for us to choose from. It'll just take a while longer, because code has to be merged. Into the one or the other driver.
* Question is, how much longer? And what about the ADSL-hardware that many broadcom SoC additionally contain?
* Since Atheros was swallowed by Qualcomm and AFAIK Qualcomm produces xDSL-hardware as well, it remains to be seen what they are going to offer.
I am still looking for a router with VDSL2-modem.