Once your laptop is stolen it's more of an issue of all your stuff being stolen as well (that is on the laptop) as opposed to just a piece of hardware. How are you supposed to do your thing if your laptop which is setup just for you has been stolen and you are at a hackathon?
(As a side note when I travel I travel with a cloned hard drive (encrypted) that can be used to boot another laptop.) Hard drive is always on carry on luggage as well. Cloning tool that I use is "super duper" (that's the name)).