Wow. The CPUs in the WiFi devices are a lot more powerful then the ones in the Ethernet ones I've seen...
With that much power/space it probably would be doable to run a PPP or SLIP daemon on the serial side and bridge/NAT out the network side. eCos' TCP/IP stack is apparently lifted straight out of FreeBSD and includes PPP. It the WiFly comes with sufficient source and documentation to spin your own firmware it'd be a reasonable possibility. It's still an order of magnitude more involved then using it as a "dumb modem" with a stock firmware, but not completely pie-in-the-sky.