I’ve done it twice. Seems like alot, but I travel over 100K miles per year. Here’s how it happens. I have a knee implant, so I have to get additional screening every time. When you do this, you can’t touch your luggage, the TSA grabs it all and carrying it to the additional screening site. You go through the drill and they finally turn you loose with your baggage. Both times it happened to me, the tray with my laptop was stacked underneath the one with the plastic bag, belt and other junk. In both cases, I was distracted when repacking all the gear and thought I had put the laptop back in the bag. Stupid happens.
In the first case, I left it in Baltimore and had a co-worker following me on a later flight. I called him when changing planes and he picked it up from TSA folks. They were very helpful. In the second case, I called the Kansas City Airport - they had it and put it in their property area and I picked it up on return. Again, very helpful and they were Contract security, not TSA (KC is one of the airports exempt from using TSA.)
I got lucky.