For a long time, unique laptop hardware had minimal support. Eventually, various Japanese users began the FreeBSD-PAO project to support this hardware. Now, various people are working on a complete rewrite of the laptop system to accommodate CardBus.
Laptops are tricky pieces of hardware.
Laptop vendors delight in making their systems proprietary, or revamping components to save a few critical ounces, or reducing battery power to extend life. Much of this trickery is undocumented. This makes hardware support marginal. And Unix was never designed for hot-swappable hardware. As you might guess, vendor support is nonexistent.