Do not set your laptop onto a solid anything that does not act as a heatsink. e.g., a solid wood desktop is a bad place to set a laptop. Even if the fans are not obstructed, the wood acts as an insulator to keep heat inside your laptop.
A key design point is that some people use notebooks on their lap, which is a much harder problem than any desk surface. Any notebook that has solved the lap cooling problem is going to be fine on a flat surface as long as the notebook still has all its feet.
The usual problem I see is airflow obstructed at the hot air exhaust. Anything near that port on the chassis is a problem. It's not just blocking that port: anything within a couple of inches may be a problem.
That's far more horsepower than the original Space Shuttle had, even including all the redundant computer backup systems. Of course, all that power in your hand comes with a tradeoff--needs more power and produces a lot more heat.
A full-up SAIL simulation of the shuttle involved 200+ computers throughout building 16 at JSC. It's hard to compare since some of those were analog computers, but my Galaxy Note II is probably more powerful than all of the SAIL computers combined, probably by an order of magnitude. SAIL may have had greater I/O bandwidth - I'm not sure how well my phone can drive its USB port.
Running at full load my cell phone gets a little warm. I'm not sure about SAIL, but trust me it wasn't just "a little warm".
Better competition is a Cray 2.
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