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What's your relevant experience on the topic?

Irrelevant. You have not demonstrated how simply connecting to an open wifi connection and browsing the net will allow someone to read the packets another user is sending/receiving. The short answer: they can't. It requires specialty programs like Ethereal and specific intent. Just connecting to an open wifi is not "sniffing the packets" as you alleged. Sniffing requires one to collect and read someone else's packets. You don't even have to connect to the AP to do that, you can just snarf them up out of the air as they are passed back and forth between third parties. If you have all the experience you claim and still don't know the difference you are either lying about you experience or lying about the difference between sniffing a packet stream and a simple connection to a network. Either one speaks poorly of your character.

Too bad you're reduced to attacking my character. Apparently your experience isn't relevant. Ethereal works fine on a wired network. I use it often to analyze protocols. If you want to do that in a wireless fashion, something like netstumbler is a more useful tool. A laptop, GPS and a mag-mount 2.4 GHz antenna is a fun way to engage in some "wardriving" to find all the "open" APs in the area.

Wi Foo is an excellent resource for improving your relevant experience. Amazon shows Wi Foo II coming out in July 2008.