[gipsies]

Not really. The STA may know that its message was received, but can never be sure whether the AP replied. The reply from the AP could have been missed due to noise, or maybe it didn't reply at all. You cannot be sure. There are only heuristics.

Good drivers indeed tell you whether the message arrived or not. But it's up to the client to decide what to do with that information. And again, it's just a heuristic. I've read and messed with the code of four different Wi-Fi clients, and none of them attempt to detect a bad password this way. Most simply report an error after trying to retransmit message 2 multiple times (e.g. if wpa_supplicant got message 1 from the AP, but didn't get a reply to message 2, it warns that maybe the password was wrong).