In the general sense, the answer would be a resounding 'NO'. A laptop may be a better option for most tasks (due to its portability, lower power consumption and compactness), but for gaming, it is totally inappropriate in a lot of ways.
The first and most important aspect is ergonomics. If you don't already know, 'ergonomics' refers to the art of designing computers to avoid/reduce discomfort or injury. Laptops don't usually have an ergonomic design, because their main focus is to provide portability. Gaming is an activity which requires quick reflexes and lots of key presses/mouse movements, continuously. Also, most games are too cumbersome to be played with the laptop's touchpad (you can attach an external mouse, but it affects portability). In fact, even for non-gaming activities, using the touchpad too much can cause nerve damage in the wrist and fingers. Hence, using a laptop as your primary gaming device could cause extreme discomfort, and even injury in the long run.
The next aspect to consider, would be the laptop's specifications. It is a well known fact that if your computer can play the latest games satisfactorily, it can pretty much run circles around every other application. Most modern games require fairly powerful hardware to run. Of course, you'd need a monster of a system to be actually able to enjoy the latest games in all their glory, with most of the bells and whistles turned on. To optimize power consumption of a laptop, usually less powerful components are used. For example, the performance of an NVidia GeForce GTX 780 (which is a powerful graphics card) on a desktop would be much better than on a laptop (which uses the 'M' variant, designed for lower power consumption). Also due to their compactness, laptops tend to be more expensive than desktops in the same bracket. For example, if you consider a laptop and a desktop having similar specifications, the laptop would cost significantly more than the desktop, even though it is likely to perform slightly worse.
Now comes the part about battery life. Games are extremely resource intensive. So, playing the latest games (on a desktop or laptop) pushes the hardware to its limits. This in turn consumes significantly more power. Hence, playing games on a laptop when it is not plugged into a power source would completely drain the battery very soon. The only viable solutions to this problem are to only play games on the laptop when there is access to a power outlet, or carry additional spare batteries (fully charged). None of these solutions are actually desirable, and in some cases may be downright inconvenient.
Here comes the final and most significant drawback of a laptop - the ability to upgrade. Under normal circumstances, only two components of a laptop are upgradable - the hard disk and RAM. This means that the two most important components which affect gaming performance - the graphics card and processor - cannot be upgraded at all. In some exceptional cases, it may be possible to upgrade the graphics card (but not the processor), but the process would be too tedious and time-consuming. Considering the rate at which hardware is advancing and the fact that game developers tend to push hardware to its limits, this is a really serious limitation of laptops.
Of course, there are some other minor advantages of using desktops instead of laptops for gaming, but there isn't really a need to mention them here because it is possible to obtain those benefits on laptops too (with a bit of work). Anyway, it should be clear by now that laptops can't even approach desktops in ANY aspect - performance, comfort, upgradability and pretty much everything else - when it involves gaming.
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