I was thinking I wouldn't like the Nvidia Shield because it doesn't seem like it does anything that special, until I attempted to do it on my laptop. What makes the shield able to play games the way it does, and why can't my laptop do that?
I've got a relatively powerful gaming PC, but I want to be able to play games on my laptop streamed from my PC and I've seen there are a couple programs that ATTEMPT to do that, but fail. Why is this possible on the shield but not on my laptop?
because they made software just for the shield to stream games in real time to it. There are just not many programs that are made for doing that are not special for a product like the sheild. Try splash top I heard that is probably the best one to try.
Sheilds performance, as raging said, is pretty much all in the software. Plus you've got to have at least a wireless N network to satisfy the data requirements.
Architecture
It's all down to software. if someone wrote software that does what the nvidia guys did, it'd sell.