Did 11s ever get ratified? Not as of August, 2011.
I followed it for 5+ years as it languished in committee, with wars between Cisco and others on whose routing algorithm is best.
Meanwhile, Tropos, Aruba and Cisco sell proprietary meshing.
With the demise of metro-WiFi (Earthlink's national build-out), and with the cable companies selling their 700MHz spectrum (to Verizon), not much market impetus for meshing. Cisco wants(ed) to adapt OSPF (from the wired world). IMO, others had much better ideas, since mesh routing needs to be based on heuristics - the error rate of each route in the last few minutes, not fewest hops or some such as in the wired world.
There are many other lesser known meshing protocols. Where meshing is defined as self-forming and self-healing, some say, when the infrastructure devices themselves move - as the military wants to do. In metro-WiFi, the infrastructure is immobile, so self-healing simply means routing around a downed link, out due to hardware failure or path blockage.
My experience (professional) is that Tropos had the best routing scheme and doesn't depend on a central controller. But they like the rest, have shrunk along with the market.
So as a personal experiment - you might want to look at open meshing schemes which are similar to one of the 11s proposals. Like
http://hothardware.com/News/Nonprofit-Group-Releases-Open-Source-WiFi-Software/
Or buy some second tier vendor's mesh.
As to QoS in a mesh: Some products do the mesh and client access on the same single radio, but with different logical networks and protocols. Cheaper. Most offer an alternative to put the inter-node mesh on 5.8GHz (unlicensed) or 4.9GHz (in the US, set-aside for public safety). And leave the access as 11b/g/n for PC compatibility. The throughput declines at about 1/n, for an n-hop route. So the design practice was to keep n <= 3. And that much backhaul is costly.
The deal-breaker in metro-WiFi mesh was the nodes on light poles had inadequate building penetration (to homes), and cannot cost-compete with DSL and indoors, the signal is weak and is slower than cheap DSL.
So, it's a bit unappealing.
