I have had good luck with that separation. I use an Apple Airport Extreme for my wifi (running in bridge mode), and a PC Engines "apu" [1] running OpenWRT for my router. I figure the wireless part is a detail I don't care too much about—it just gets my laptop onto the wired ethernet. The router is totally open source and hackable and I like that.

[1] http://pcengines.ch/apu1d.htm