This has always seemed slightly strange to me, but for a different reason.
Lasers have divergence. High-powered military targeting lasers tend to have LOTS of divergence by laser standards, up to several mils (Russian tank rangefinder specs are particularly shocking). "First return" vs. "Last return" matters for lasers almost as much as it does for radars. Not only that, but laser rangefinders have some amount of uncertainty on their clocks, and that leads to an uncertainty in the range result.
Now in DCS we have perfect GPS elevation data and perfectly collimated lasers controlled by perfect clocks, so using the laser will let you get the range to a tank's side rather than the range to the ground under the tank. But that just seems like a gross over-estimation of the capabilities of both systems. It seems like in real life you might want to use the laser to make up for any inaccuracies in the GPS data, but unless the tank is silhouetted against a ridge the CEP has got to be more than the difference between the side of the tank and the ground.
But then again, the accuracies of these things are almost certainly classified. I'm sure the laser in a Litening or Sniper pod is nothing like the one on a T-72, and probably significantly better than the one on an Abrams; I'll just probably never know by how much.
