Giving edit access to Google Drive documents is sufficient. The way these files work, once they are shared with a user, the file will appear in their "Shared with me" list
If they remove or delete a file from this list, it will not remove the document from any other user's list, nor will it destroy the file. Only the owner can trash a document.
Learn more about trashing documents here: http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2494934&p=restore_trash_collab
If the owner trashes a document, they can get it back from their Trash folder:
Learn how to recover a file or folder that you moved to the trash.
If something in Google Drive is moved to the trash, you'll see a
warning and you may lose access to it at any time. Read one of the
following sections to learn how to restore it to your Google Drive
from the trash. When you restore something, it'll be recovered in
Google Drive on the web, to the Google Drive folder on your computer,
and to your mobile devices.
If the item is in a folder, you’ll need to restore the entire folder
to recover any individual items inside of it.
Owners
If you're the owner of something and you’ve placed it in the trash,
you'll see a warning that reads "This item is in your trash" when you
open the doc or file.
If you’d like to restore a doc or file to your Google Drive:
Search for it in the Trash. Select the file(s) or doc(s) you’d like to
recover. Click the Restore button.
Folders and file structures behave the same way, if regular editors remove these it will disappear from their "Shared with me" list but it only affects them, not the rest of the collaborators.
The solution you describe is the best solution.
I personally have "email@address.com" as my top level in my different Google Apps accounts, and I bookmark that page (where I have browsed into that folder) in my toolbar.
This seems to be the best solution for me, and at a glance it is very obvious which folder I want in my other drives.
On a day to day basis, just clicking on that bookmark is enough to get me into the folder that I treat as "root"
You can also use a URL shortener to create links like blah.blah/persdrive that you can then use on public/shared computers where you don't have your bookmarks. I do that for my Google Apps for domains to avoid typing the whole google.com/a/domain.com every time
Best Answer
Well, you're pretty much screwed. If you don't have any kind of remote access to your laptop, or some sort of access, you have no way of getting in there and removing all that local data.
What you could do is back up your Google Drive folder, delete all the data from it, and hope the automatic sync will remove your data from the laptop when the perpetrator attempts to access it.