Saving more power when not in range of wifi access points

[SmileyDragon]

As Android only disables wifi rather than turning it off, is it possible to include a button to actually turn it off (not disable - they are very different things) when it isn't wanted, maybe with some slightly different code, or will it take google to write a new driver?

I don't use wifi on my phone for various reasons. As such I want to be able to turn the wi-fi off completely rather than just disabling it.

I did some tests with a tablet I bought about 2 years ago which was using about 5% of the power over a week even when wifi was disabled. When enabled it used up to 9% of the battery usage over a week, despite not actually using wifi to connect to anything. As battery life was more important to me (and as I used to work in electronics) I removed the wifi chip to see how that improved matters. When the wifi chip was removed the battery life was extended considerably, much more than I expected at the time and more than it should if just in standby.

No apps I have tried (100+ apps over 2 years so far) turn it off properly. No android phones or different OS versions that I have tried turn it off. They all seem to call the same basic android code that everyone uses to disable it instead. (although a friend recently suggested a 'jellykat' rom to try)

BTW: no linux devices I have tried turn it off properly in software either! (Linksys, Dlink, netgear...)
Some Vista and Win7 laptops (Dell, IBM, HP) do if you have the original drivers.
IOS used to turn it off properly up to v4.1. After that they followed the same path as google and disabled it instead. Maybe this change caused the well documented battery life problems in v4.2 onwards?