What would happen to wildcard SSL certs which depend on the main site being at www.example.com as opposed to example.com which a wildcard cert does not match?

What would happen to wildcard SSL certs which depend on the main site being at www.example.com as opposed to example.com which a wildcard cert does not match? Likewise with restricted cookies, most browsers fail to allow you to restrict a cookie to example.com alone (this restricts to all subdomains also). Restricting to www.example.com gets around this problem. These complaints seem unfounded, the real problem is people not using permanent redirects on example.com to www.example.com