Just a note, this is a bit long for a comment so I'll be posting here. I don't intend to adress the whole question but just to explain why I did find using laptops to take notes useful in my case.
We used to take note on laptops during my master CS degree. For us the main advantage was that we used shared notes (using Google Docs), this way several people could work on the same document at the same time. This allowed us to have a more complete document because even when the course's pace is fast, there are different people who can work on different parts. For exemple someone is the main note writer, while someone else draws any schema (which is usually fastidious / long), while someone else writes down the oral comments of the teacher or the questions asked by a students and the answer given by the teacher. The roles were switched several times a day and were mainly on a voluntary basis. This was put in place rather spontaneously without
Google docs features a chat which also helped in case of conflict, errors, or any kind of problem without disturbing the class. The chat (and the ability to comment on a part of a document) was also useful after the class when people were studying on their own, because thay could talk to people who were doing the same.
Aside from the note keeping aspect, we also used a shared folder to share any document used by the course (documentation, the course's slides when available, source code used for exercises, logos used for official stuff, past years test subjects, related websites, wikipedia articles, any loosely related stuff).
I feel this helped me a lot because I'm usually not good at taking notes and this way I always had something correct at the end. Even when you aren't fully following (you're tired, sick, bored, sleeping, absent or whatever) you can stop taking notes, just listen to the teacher and you know you won't be missing anything. There were foreign students who used this as a way to check their notes by comparing the shared one and their own (the documents were most often written in English even if we were not in an English speaking country ... in CS most if not all of the documents and some of the courses were in english anyway).
There were times, obviously, when it was used for fun. Someone often shared funny pictures this way. In our case it was always minor and never in a way that bothered the ones taking the notes and cleaned up afterwards, but I guess it depends on the students.
Some context :
We were about 35 students taking this degree. Everyone had a laptop, though not everyone used it to take notes. There were usually 2 concurrent shared documents done by different people (between 3 and 8 people were participating on each document). Both documents were shared freely with all students, whether they participated or not.
In some case the documents were also given to the teacher at the end of the semester (at their request).