I'd always bring a laptop. Unfortunately, the one I own is fairly old and my current work one doesn't have a DVD burner, so I'm going to bring along the DVD burner out of my desktop PC as well as a USB cord that will allow it to work externally.
When it comes to storing photos, remember that laptop hard drives are easily the least reliable place to store your photos... ideally you'll want redundant hard drives (one internal and one external) to store two copies of your photos on. My plan is to burn two duplicate DVDs of all the raw files. I've seen way too many hard drives fail to trust me vacation photos to them!
If I absolutely could not bring along a laptop, I'd probably grab two of those cheap devices that dump data from a memory card directly to a laptop hard hard drive, and put all my photos on both of them. It's all about redundancy!