This reminds me of when my friend's fairly high-end laptop was stolen from a party at his house. This was back in my wardriving days, so we went out several times looking for the MAC address of the wifi card. We didn't end up finding it though, and his parents' homeowners insurance replaced it.

If you have the MAC address and think it is still in the local area, you can definitely use a tool like kismet to look for it.