I wonder if anyone who already knows this can clear something up for me: can I install Skyrim on both my desktop and my gaming laptop? I don't know how Steam views this and I expect it might take me a while to find this out, so if anyone already knows I would be grateful for the info

My expectation would be that Steam would allow me to have as many installs as I need (within reason) but only one instance of each license to run at any one time.

Yes, you can install on as many machines as you like with steam, but only play on one at the time. (Some games on steam use additional DRM aswell though, i don't know about skyrim)

Thanks for the answer sounds good.

I would suspect you could get around this by playing in offline mode.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3160-AGCB-2555