Laptops need to be thought of as commodity carriers for data, not the end object in themselves. Encryption, offsite backup, etc are what we need to be mostly concerned with, not so much protecting the laptop itself. Frankly in the long run, it's futile to think you can totally prevent theft or failure.

On a lighter note, here's a story about lost and recovered research 'data'

http://jalopnik.com/5963982/the-university-of-maine-scallop-guts-placed-in-the-wrong-car-have-been-found