Unfortunately dmesg does not appear to provide sufficient granularity for the Targus hub; it identifies that a usb hub of some sort is attached, and it has several ports, but does not go into enough detail. :/

FYI, the Targus hub has 2 regular usb ports, 2 high-powered usb ports, 1 vga port, 1 com port, 1 ethernet port, 1 earphone jack and one microphone jack.

EDIT: just tested the cheap blue dongles, results are--

-dmesg reports dongle as Davicom DM9601 USB Ethernet
-out of 4 dongles purchased, 2 are able to reliably achieve a connection and enable internet browsing

It looks like the other 2 "want" to connect, but their inability points toward the flakiness ascribed earlier to these cheap devices. They're technically capable, but apparently the "QC PASSED" sticker is just for show.

Also, I'm not sure what happened, but now the SMC dongle works! So I have 4 working devices. In fact the SMC outperforms the others (I'm not surprised).

EDIT 2: I think I'll tack on a list of tested devices to the wiki article. Seems to me the format should be something like:

-Device name/model
-chipset
-functionality (works well, doesn't work, partially works, etc)
-unique aspects

EDIT 3: three devices added to end of wiki article