Well, hacking is honestly a pretty loose term and I honestly am not fond of the word. If you use a loop hole or a known exploit I would not consider that hacking, I would consider that a poor network administrator. People using zero day exploits, now that is more hacking in my mind.
Yes, you can download backtrack and run it, but if you don't know how to use it, it is useless to you. It is also hardware dependent on certain things. Like for example, not too many WiFi cards allow for packet injection. This is because there are no published source code out there for these wifi cards. They are too scared that if they go open source with them that the 'hackers' will do too many bad things. Thus, why we see crappy wireless card support for linux, and how some developers have used technologies like the ndis-wrapper which allows you to use the wifi card on a real basic level.