If you can wire your laptop up to the net with Live Ubuntu, I'd run an "update" in Synaptic and snoop restricted drivers. I'm sure not EVERY wireless driver ships on the Live CD.
As an aside, Linux drivers, unlike Windows drivers, are not really branded; that is to say, they are identified by the chip on the card, not the manufacturer id and model number. There are, therefore, substantially fewer drivers to sort through, and there's a much higher likelihood of drivers existing on any given Linux distro's install disc than there is for Windows.
If you want to get in to technical details, the driver is associated with a set of mf/device ids (rather than a single pair), so it's possible to have some obscurely manufactured hardware for which a driver exists, but is unusable. An example of this would be the wireless card that Macs got in the first hardware revision of the intel era; there was a patch you had to download and apply to the kernel module sources to add the device id to the map. That patch has since then been merged in to the official sources.
So, the lesson to take away from this is that it's almost always possible to get around ndiswrapper, and you're usually better off doing so if you can.
