I don't buy laptops with built in optical drives, as I like smaller and lighter laptops than that.
To load software onto the new laptop I simply plug the new laptop into the home network and stick the DVD into a drive on a desktop somewhere. Obviously it doesn't then autoload (on the laptop), you have to navigate to it and click on setup.exe or whatever.
In theory software could detect that you weren't using a real local DVD and refuse to install, suspecting piracy, but in fact that has never happened to me yet.