My thought would be an open source app that would run on the laptop.
Sites that want to be available
for use as in the air hotspots could either register with a central
website that would log the information and gps location
or perhaps broadcast a special wifi identifier. When a hotspot was
found by the laptop, it would automatically query
for any weather reports of interest and update the display.

I would expect the wifi hotspot should probably be locked down to
allow access to aviation/weather related sites only.
This would minimize abuse of a hotspot and bandwidth usage.

I don't see why a little more capability could not be utilized than that.
Perhaps some plain text E-mail connection could be made. It would be darn
handy to be able to send and receive a few E-mails while airborn. I agree
that wholesale web surfing would be a problem, though.

At this point I do not even own any wifi devices, so I am not sure how
much of the firewall capability is built
into wifi devices. Once I finish my pilot training this is something I
plan to experiment with though.

Cool. I await your results.

Something like this could bring a real awakening to hams, increasing numbers
of members and an increase of utility to a great degree.
--
Jim in NC