Tempestnut, while I agree that luggage should be returned promptly, intact and complete after such events, and that doing so may help reduce morons' temptation to evacuate with their baggage, your comments condone this irresponsible and utterly selfish behaviour.
I believe that the problem is now so widespread that ICAO needs to secure mandatory prosecution of all and any passengers who do this. There are already laws in place that would cover this: "failure to comply with legal commands or instructions from crew" and "endangering the safe conduct of the flight", amongst others, and these have a two year custodial sentence in many countries.
If passengers are going to endanger others because of the inconvenience of losing the data on a laptop which has been backed up remotely, to quote and incredibly stupid example, then these idiots deserve to be locked away for as long as the law permits.
Passengers have no idea about what is happening inside or outside the aircraft, of how things work and of what risks exist. Crew don't always get it right, and the SWA pax at La Guardia were right to initiate their own evacuation, but to ignore safety demonstrations and decide that their own luggage is more valuable than others' lives is criminal and should be treated as such. I would love to see an absolutely brutal crack down on this behaviour.