My boyfriend is all about patching electronics back together (or sometimes patching electronics to each other in a strange lumpy Frankensteinian mess - he'd rather buy two broken Sanza mp3 players for super cheap and cobble together one working one than, y'know, actually buy a working mp3 player) and he once replaced his own laptop's screen, after using it like a desktop for a while. So it's doable, and IMHO doesn't look any much more fiddly than normal tinkering-with-electronic-innards, if you have a nice tinkering-friendly laptop.