Not wanted to start anything like a flame war, but theres got to be distros that cater to the laptops more than others.

My preference is either Fedora Core 3 or Ubuntu (Hoary).

I would agree with LoL. FC3 does a pretty good job of dealing with laptop hardware. Ubuntu does a really good job, with suspend to ram and suspend to disk both working out of the box. You can get things to work on Gentoo, but it takes weeks of tinkering and tweaking to get the same functionality you can get in a 20min install of Ubuntu.