Wow?

No, but using a driver that combines intimately with a non-GPL piece of software does. E.g. ath_hal, which is what this article discusses. ath_hal taints my kernel. As would the nvidia and ATI drivers that do the same trick (GPL wrapper around a blob).

Now that a free alternative to ath_hal exists, I can get non-tainting of my kernel. Which means I don't have to unload ath_hal in order to report bugs.