Hey Ed--almost all the calibration tools deal with luminosity / brightness in my experience. But you are absolutely right about most LCD panels--they're incredibly contrasty and bright and bandy in the shadows, too
I have an HP I use at shows and it's just disgusting how the colour shifts off-axis. I never use it, or a laptop, for colour critical work.
But you guys with laptops have issues anyway... it's very hard to profile and calibrate a laptop panel--they don't have the right video cards and they don't have the bit-depth capability for colour in their panel look-up-tables (LUTs).
The best advice for the laptop is "make it more or less as bright as your printed output, and pray"... or learn to adjust your prints by their RGB or CMYK values, and the profiling / calbration be damned, because if you know, say, that something is neutral in your output space, then it should print neutrally though it be green or polka dot on your monitor