Well, the main attraction of solar sailing has been:
1. No power source required for propulsion.
2. No reaction mass needs to be expended.
The weigh penalties for these is suddenly reinstated when you add an ion drive, which requires both power and reaction mass.
Maybe there's still a net gain since you only need to carry a fraction of the reaction mass to get to a certain speed, but the math gets pretty wonky. I can't really see the large scale usefulness of laser sails myself, but maybe I think small.
Personally, here's my thought on where this technology will go. Instead of propelling spacecraft around the system, perhaps the reflective and lightweight sail material will be fashioned into large solar reflectors/focusers that can be used to melt asteroids to enable easy processing. They could also be used in earth orbit to reflect extra sunlight into areas for the purpose of increasing crop yields/environmental sculpting. Want a longer spring? No problem, SolarCo can, for a modest fee, increase the sunshine in your country by 20%.
Heck, you could use the same sort of large scale solar reflectors to generate massive amounts of power too. Build passenger liner sized closed cycle liquid sodium reactors in orbit. Instead of using nuclear fission to heat the mix, use sunlight reflected from a 1,000 acre reflector that's affixed a mile or two away that will focus the sun on the heat exchangers.
Imagine huge farms of these balanced at L5 for constant sunshine, all microwaving their power to collection stations that hook into the grid.
Back to asteroids, there's also a proposal to use reflected sunlight to melt an asteroid, then release carefully sized packages of water that would flash to steam and carefully 'blow up' the asteroid like a balloon. When cooled, the resulting structure could be pressurized and converted into a colony.
