Out of curiosity, have you written a driver for a real network card, or are you guessing as to its difficulty? One of my college OS class's assignments was to write an e1000 driver, and as I recall, it was way easier than, like, getting interrupt handling right.
Drivers are also pluggable, by nature. Why do you think this constrains the OS to the "toy" category? Or do you mean it constrains only the current version, and if so, do you believe there to be an observable difference between "toy" and "prerelease"?
http://pdosnew.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/labs/lab6/
Drivers are also pluggable, by nature. Why do you think this constrains the OS to the "toy" category? Or do you mean it constrains only the current version, and if so, do you believe there to be an observable difference between "toy" and "prerelease"?