Hi. My Pi is hooked up to a powerline network thing just through the RJ45 on the Pi, but I suppose you could use a wifi dongle if you want. On the laptop, you just set the pulse sink to be the Pi's pulseaudio (need avahi running on both to see the Pi in the audio preferences pane on the laptop). You can play whatever you like on the laptop itself and the audio is routed through the Pi, so there's no need to log into the Pi itself once it's set up.