I understand, definitely, and I was kind of bummed too. But there's plenty of other games out there, to be sure. I know the pain of a laptop -- my main desktop is a good 5 years old now (hoping to build a new one this summer), and I spend a decent amount of time on a laptop as well. Thankfully the explosion of indie gaming makes it easier to find stuff that will run. If nothing else, Dwarf Fortress will work on just about anything...
The thing about indie games is one is not like another, at their engine. Where one simple-looking game might go on with flying colors on the laptop (say, MHRD), another would lag as if it has some 3D behind it, which it decisively doesn't (like TIS-100). The thing about Dota 2... I was able to launch it on a 10' laptop with 1 GB of RAM. It took space off some of the system resources and built it up to the very brim, but it launched. Didn't go very far, mind you, with only 5 FPS or so, but the fact it was capable of being launched on such a low-end system is astonishing. But to play it now, I have to switch back to my HDD manually every time. The system is entirely capable of running the game, but inclusion of SSD ruins CPU-intensive games (and only games) for some fucking reason.