After a couple days and lots of research trying to get my setup just right, I realized it only took a few steps. I used my own SD card, loaded Pidora on it from my Mac, and got the wireless USB dongle up and running. Getting the wifi working was not easy. I tried a number of approaches and finally found the right commands.

These commands are taken from various other "quick start guides" but simplified here. This assumes you are somewhat familiar with a command line and that you are using Mac OS to set up the SD card:

On your Mac:
1. Insert the SD card and get the device of your SD card 2. Unmount the disk with the device listed above 3. Write the disk image to the SD card On your Pi:
1. Insert the card in the Raspberry Pi and start it up.
2. Fire up your wireless network 3. Celebrate!

I also recommend installing net-tools (provides ifconfig) and updating the system (as root): Hopefully this will save someone some googling! Happy hacking!

Thanks for the post.

ifconfig *is* available in Pidora without installing net-tools, it's just named "pifconfig"

At first I though it was named like that as some sort of nod to the "pi" (Pidora, pifconfig, etc.) but it's actually part of the python-ethtool pacakge:
Best regards,

---Kayvan