Mac exhibiting inexplicable network disconnects? Lately, I've seen a few Mac computers that can a) see the wireless network, b) "connect" to the wireless network, and c) receive a valid IP address, yet when a web browser is launched it's stuck in an eternal loading loop, or when the ping utility is used, it returns with a connection timeout.

I've solved these problems in the past by making a new network location, but recently that alone hasn't seemed to fix it immediately. I'll make a new location being sure to hit 'Apply', even going so far as to restart the computer, but none of these things seem to work as I expect them to. Internet connectivity will "magically" return a ways into troubleshooting, and I wish I had a more concrete explanation as to why. Could anyone elaborate on these situations?
It sounds like you're having DNS issues. Most Cocoa apps make DNS calls that are handled via mDNSResponder nowadays, so if the mDNSResponder process is having a problem, even traditional unicast DNS lookups will fail.  Next time this happens, try...

sudo killall -9 mDNSResponder


...this is sure to kill mDNSResponder. Don't worry, launchd will automatically restart it.

It's possible that whatever was causing mDNSResponder to hang was cleared up by your troubleshooting steps, or maybe you triggered a network configuration change that cause mDNSResponder to reload itself.

There are still a few command-line tools that use traditional Unix DNS resolver libraries that don't leverage mDNSResponder. These include host, dig, and nslookup.  Another way to see if it's just mDNSResponder and not DNS in general is to use one of those three tools to do a DNS lookup the next time the problem happens.

I also agree with another user's suggestion to ping a host by IP address. I would recommend that you do...

ping -n 8.8.8.8


...the -n tells ping not to try to do a reverse DNS lookup on the host you're pinging. 8.8.8.8 is a nice memorable IP address for one of Google's publicly-accessible resolving DNS servers.