For that, the laptop must be on and booted. The main advantage of the hardware rfkill switch is that you can flick it to disabled before booting or waking up the laptop, so that it doesn't even try to connect before you can get to the wireless icon.
(I've done that before: on a plane, want to use the laptop, which is sleeping in the bag; just flick the rfkill switch and open the lid to resume from suspend.)
Fair point. However, planes don't require turning off wifi or bluetooth during normal flight anymore. (And even when they did, no actual harm was done either way.)
When I last flew (domestically, last year), the instruction was still that devices could only be used if they had an "airplane mode" function. Things might be different in your country. (And yes, I know normal 802.11 probe request packets won't do much interference, if any, to airplane systems. Still, it doesn't harm to flick the rfkill switch to disabled.)
Sometimes airlines fail to communicate that well. A friend of mine had a flight where they first warned against using any device with any kind of radio transmitter, shortly followed by "please enjoy our in-flight wifi".
Oh wait, they're doing that already. And the usability sucks.
I'm running i3, not GNOME. I want a damn hardware switch when I need to flick wireless off. I don't want to have to keyboard OR mouse around to do it. You want a plain black slab, go buy one. There's a market for what we want, and ThinkPads shouldn't be that plain black slab. Leave that to Apple.
I click on the wireless icon and click "turn off". It's good that command-line syntax exists, but that doesn't make it the only way, or necessarily the simplest way.
For that matter, some laptop models offer a function key to do the same thing.