I'm sure there are benefits to this approach, but I've transferred laptops before by launching an installer on both and then combining dd and nc on both ends. If I recall correctly, I also added gzip to the mix to make transferring large null sections faster.

With the author not having access to an ethernet port on the new laptop, I think my hacky approach might've even been faster because of the slight boost compression would've provided, given that the network speed is nowhere near the speed limit compression would add to a fast network link.