Even without blinking, the plane is quite far away and moving with great speed. How could a laser actually get pointed into someone's eye for more than 0.2s?
Edit: not sure why people are downvoting. If the point source is spread by diffracting through the window, count of photons per unit area is reduced in proportion to the square of the difference in radius from, say, an inch or so, depending on the spread of the beam with distance, to a large enough cone to apparently light up the cockpit. Which means a 1mW laser goes from ≈1mW/in^2 to ≈.01mW/in^2 if the cone spreads to a diameter of 10 inches by the time it hits the pilot's eye.
Even closing your eyes is not sufficient for some of them. They can light up your eyelids brightly enough to cause damage even reflected twice.
So even a glancing contact will give you a full dazzle, blinding you for at least a few minutes, and possibly permanent damage if you're unlucky.
You can find them all over eBay and Alibaba in even higher wattages. I've seen 15w
Industrial lasers are terribly dangerous.
Above all else, sucks that this happened. Are/were you okay?
The plane moves fast but it's also far away, so the angle it changes by relative to the guy with the pointer is small. To follow it, you wouldn't have to move the tip of the pointer more than (if my rough calculations are right) about a centimeter a second.
At that point of the flight, the pilot's eyes are constantly jumping from a methodical scan of internal instruments to the runway and back. Anything that distracts or jeopardises that process can snowball into a big problem.
In many ways, the short term effects of a laser pointer pose a far more serious threat to safety.