Most patents affecting what they have, especially the 2D portion, should be expired by now.
If they aren't, this probably counts as prior art in its own right.

This fits on some pretty small Xilinx and Altera boards:
Spartan 3, Cyclone II 25, and Cyclone III.
If you look in the right place, $30 is likely to be enough.

This company already has somewhat of a market (air traffic being one, IIRC). But yes, it is niche.
Now, the full product has some nice features like a builtin VNC server...

Wrong. None of the projects on opencores have something that's anywhere near this far along and feature-complete.
There are LCD controllers, text mode VGA designs, and one or two framebuffer-level VGA adapters. And framebuffer is essentially garbage.

The Kickstarter is for a code drop, no hardware.

According to Francis Bruno, the 2D version fits on a Cyclone II 25 or a Spartan 3.

Still, I'm inclined to think it makes more sense to listen to someone who's done something that worked than someone who isn't interested in trying it "because it won't work"...

...until the power bill spoils your fun.

Especially 'older' x86 gear is easily in the 130-150 watts range idle, compared to ~10 watts for a typical home router. Another issue is the antenna situation, you don't want long cables to 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz antennas, but at the same time keeping the close to a big steel PC case affects your reception as well. The same goes with the price, while you can get a decent 2.4 GHz wlan card for around 20 EUR, 5 GHz capable ones start around 40 EUR - so the radios alone easily reach the price ranged asked for pretty good mass-produced plastic router (which have no interference/ shielding issues).

In most cases, unless we're counting the number of concurrent users in the medium 2-figure range, a cheap plastic router is a much better choice, which pays off within a few months just through saved electricity. With only a bit of searching you can even find pretty hackable devices as well.

OP said "an old netbook".
I don't know which one he has, but my 2009 Atom N270-based Aspire One netbook ran a little under 20 watts, per Powertop. That's hardly worthy of mention.

If it's a netbook, there's no steel case.

If it supports master mode in all the operating systems named, my guess is he has an Atheros card.
Those can be pretty good, depending on the card; a number of the commercial routers use them, though DD-WRT targets Broadcom cards.

That would be much better.

"So what do you think would BG's return signal a reemergence of MS?"

Either omit the "what" or add a dash after "signal". As it stands it's nonsense.