Linux and my laptop

Simple answer is: it depends. Touchpads and wireless adapters usually work if you use one of the 'bleeding edge' distributions, but wireless in particular is a hodge-podge of different manufacturers, some of whom support Linux and some don't.

Pretty much everything works on my Toshiba Qosmio, for example, and everything works on my Asus netbook, but I went out of my way to ensure that by checking the hardware support before I bought them.

BTW, the best idea is to first try booting from a LiveCD and see if the hardware works: then you can install the OS on the disk knowing that you're not going to get stuck with a half-working computer!

^+1, most Linux distros, and I am pretty sure all of the major ones/popular ones have live CD's. Boot into and try it out, if you find everything works then you know you can install, if not, then just pull the CD out and your done   Ubuntu and Fedora seem to be particularly amazing with wireless/video drivers. They automatically give you full screen resolutions (from my experience)...without any driver and Fedora seems to install wifi drivers itself automatically and gets everything working, while in Ubuntu you just need to open up the hardware drivers application and activate it. Its extremely simple.