Wow, just discovered my wife's Alienware 17 will play from my camcorder's HDMI output!
It appears it simply switched the laptop's monitor to display whatever is inbound on the HDMI cable. This would be great for a college dorm or possibly playing a little xBox, Raspberry Pi or other device on your laptop screen.
Unfortunately, I was looking for a way to record HD video in digital format directly from the camcorder, and there's no indication the signal goes anywhere but to the monitor.