You're fortunate. Yes, there are some laptops that can do it, but most have NVidia Optimus getting in the way, and it's nearly impossible to tell which ones are okay and which are not just from spec sheets, so I can see why they just say "no laptops".
I used Windows, because the rest of the hackathon team I was on was using Windows. We were using Unity, but we didn't want there to be any problems getting the code to run on multiple OSs. I know that Unity makes it easy to do that, but we didn't want to risk it.
Edit: Also remembered that we used as Kinect, which requires Windows
(Although it's quite a beefy laptop, optimised for 3D work.)