Just farting around trying to see what rooms in my house have a good wifi signal. While doing this I noticed that the download speed on my phone (Droid Bionic) is about 4.5 times faster than my laptop. Phone is sitting on a table right next to laptop, and I used speedtest.net for both and ran it multiple times.

Bad/cheap wifi adapter on the laptop?

That would be my first guess, or that the wifi adapter in your phone is mult-stream / mimo / faster than the one in your laptop.

802.11n - in the 2.4ghz spectrum now has 150mbps, 300mbps, 450mbps and I believe a 600mbps is on the way.

These relate to the chipsets, antenna's, number of channels, etc. the combination determines how much bandwidth the device is actually capable of utilizing.

Similarly for 802.11n on the 5ghz spectrum.

-S

I'm surprised there's much difference. Shouldn't your home internet connection(DSL, Cable) be the bottleneck?

As an aside to your farting around, Wifi Analyzer in Google Play(still weird typing that) is great for testing signal strength in certain areas of your home.

Leonard the rookie?
Was the old one Leonard H or something?