Those are interesting points made by Jim and Ethan, but I think the one thing you are overlooking, more than any other, is just how narrow the band of highest winds usually is and how unlikely it is that those highest winds find an observation station that is able to survive and record them. I'm thinking of all hurricanes, not just Laura.
I know that I, personally, until a few years ago, always kind of pictured a hurricane as being this huge thing producing 100+ mile winds that scoured the earth for 20, 30, 50 miles across a damage path, but I know now that that is not the case. There is only a very (relatively speaking) narrow band of the highest winds in a hurricane's eyewall, and then pretty much only in the right-front quadrant, too. I believe, and this is based on many many hours of reading stuff on the internet over the last 20 years, that the band of the top 10mph of winds is typically only one or two hundred yards in width, much like a large tornado.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe it to be true. That would explain why ob stations never seem to catch the highest winds per HH/NHC data, whereas with all the equipment and skill that the HH's have and the fact that they penetrate the hurricanes perpendicularly they are able to find those (sustained) wind peaks. The HH's use of sondes and SFMR makes me trust their data.
I'm not saying that the hurricanes only have a band of damaging winds the size of a tornado. Of course they do far more damage than that, but it mostly comes with winds that are a category or two less than what the NHC is saying, as everyone else is saying in this thread.