Sounds like the actual learning secret is "don't take verbatim notes", and the only relevance of the laptop is that it makes it much easier to take verbatim notes. I've pretty much only ever taken notes with a laptop, but I always take notes in the "digest and summarize" style, never recording the speaker's words verbatim, and it's worked great for me. (It wasn't a conscious decision; it's just how I take notes.)
It's not just the verbatim aspect, part of the issue actually is the distinction between laptop and paper. When you hand write notes, another piece of information you store in your mind is where on the page you wrote it, and what it looks like. Then, when you need to recall, you can often remember where it was on the page and generally what it looked like there, and that can help remember the actual content.