Latency can also come from using the wrong soundcard and driver. Laptops are notorious for having cheap sound chips and using MME drivers. They are designed to play one wave or mp3 at a time, and not processing multiple files and soft synths all at the same time while recording another track. (full duplex)
I don't think there's an "off the shelf" laptop made that has a sound card that will do music the way we do it, and do it well. That's why most everyone using a laptop for their DAW is running an external USB or Firewire interface with ASIO for the driver.
My Dell laptop simply would NOT run the DAW software and keep the music properly synced. The latency was off the charts bad. I could plug in my Focusrite Saffire interface, reboot and play the same song with that setup and everything was perfectly synced up like it's supposed to be.
Yes.... the settings for BUFFERS and LATENCY need to be set correctly regardless of the soundcard/interface but having the right card/driver combo really helps too.