Brickv connects to my stack over Wifi.. then tells me there is no Wifi Extension present. Clearly impossible!

I thinks what's happening here is that brickv calls is_wifi_present() on the Master Brick and this calls gets a timeout (see the timeout counter shows 1). This makes brickv not show the WIFI configuration UI.

It could retry, no? And after N retries print a message where the UI ought to be saying "Cannot determine presence of Wifi Extension".

It could retry but that wouldn't help much in general. In your case a spontaneous timeout hits is_wifi_present(). But a spontaneous timeout might hit any other function call as well. We'd have to add retry handling to all API function calls. That's quite a lot of work. I'll note it down as a future enhancement possibility.