How about easier installation?

Wouldn't help much - most of the drivers that need firmware that can't be 
distributed (i.e. the reverse engineered drivers, such as b43) rely on a 
particular version of firmware (otherwise, it leads to a support 
nightmare, since they can't support every firmware version going - they 
tried that with bcm43xx).

So being able to extract from a random vendor disc of the week is not much 
use here (and firmware versions required also change as well - e.g. this 
has happened recently with b43). No, the only real solution is still for 
the offending vendors to at least allow their firmware to be 
redistributed, and then let the distributions handle which version of the 
firmware to ship with the kernel they provide.