you're in the thick of experiencing this for yourself, but it bears saying: FreeBSD (and as a result PC-BSD) doesn't follow the "everything and the kitchen sink" mentality of a lot of the Linux distros. the burden of implementing (or attempting to implement) the correct drivers is placed on the user; that being said, i think Kris & Co. have done an awesome job of getting us *most* of the way there, but sometimes there will be hiccups.
depending on how things work out with the wireless driver, you might consider submitting a hardware report for your specific HP model to the FreeBSD list (
http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd/index.html).