Stuff seems slightly different here (in the UK), at least based on what I've heard from students in the US and absorbed through popular culture (ha).
I didn't have my own laptop most of the time I was an undergrad, and although students these days tend to have them rather than desktops, I don't see that many carrying them around/taking them to lectures/tutorials. Certainly if a student I taught whipped out their laptop I'd be amazed.
I was taught computer science at a fairly 'traditional' institution where we learned from OHPs, Powerpoint and printed notes rather than live code demos that you could type out on your laptop and play with while the lecturer was talking. (I recently went to a tutorial day that was run like this and it was amazing; I'm not necessarily advocating learning to code on paper, but it does help you pass exams where you have to write code on paper..)
Anyway, without computer labs many people out and about on campus wouldn't have e-mail or 'net access, and as others have pointed out it let us run a pretty complex setup for teaching (ML and Java through some insane whacked-out emacs customisation; to this day I use vim as a result of that teaching). I guess the general 'labs as somewhere the general student body goes to write essays aren't needed' applies, but a nice quiet room full of the sound of people typing is a great environment to get work done, and at least at the universities I'm familiar with in the UK, there's not much room for laptops. Plus laptops have distractions on, and lab machines don't.
I didn't have my own laptop most of the time I was an undergrad, and although students these days tend to have them rather than desktops, I don't see that many carrying them around/taking them to lectures/tutorials. Certainly if a student I taught whipped out their laptop I'd be amazed.
I was taught computer science at a fairly 'traditional' institution where we learned from OHPs, Powerpoint and printed notes rather than live code demos that you could type out on your laptop and play with while the lecturer was talking. (I recently went to a tutorial day that was run like this and it was amazing; I'm not necessarily advocating learning to code on paper, but it does help you pass exams where you have to write code on paper..)
Anyway, without computer labs many people out and about on campus wouldn't have e-mail or 'net access, and as others have pointed out it let us run a pretty complex setup for teaching (ML and Java through some insane whacked-out emacs customisation; to this day I use vim as a result of that teaching). I guess the general 'labs as somewhere the general student body goes to write essays aren't needed' applies, but a nice quiet room full of the sound of people typing is a great environment to get work done, and at least at the universities I'm familiar with in the UK, there's not much room for laptops. Plus laptops have distractions on, and lab machines don't.