The bad news is that the cc1101 (like earlier sub-Ghz radios in this line) might need an external antenna rather than a a tiny on-board one. But, maybe I’m wrong. Look at these comments:

http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?p=57626

The reason you might get longer range is pretty simple: tradeoff data rate (that is, when the width of a symbol is big, then you can go longer range, but with fewer symbols per second). A disadvantage of low data rates in our application is the potential for high collision rates in dense deployments.
We might want to look into this a bit more, though glancing at the cc1101 datasheet shows me there would be quite a few problems in the radio stack to overcome. I didn’t look at the radio stack implementation of TelosW.

Complicated decision process for this, but worth knowing about.