What you are referring to is not "just" static methods. It is known as the Facade pattern and was utilised entirely for the increased testability it provides. In light of that - the comment about debugging rings slightly hollow.
Furthermore Laravel 4 uses the whoops error framework - which provides very in depth errors.
Yes, just quoting the docs: "Facades provide a "static" interface to classes that are available in the application's IoC container."
Your comment on Whoops rings a bit hollow because it was only added a few weeks ago. I was using it before it was added but it certainly helps. That was before Laravel hit 4.0 stable though.
Whenever something didn't work for some reason, digging through the abstraction that is Laravel+Symfony could be frustrating. Thankfully Symfony 2 has good API docs.
You are using a proper IDE with XDebug or Zend Debugger installed, right?
I don't mean this in a snarky way at all. If you're not, and you work with some of the more complex frameworks like Laravel, do yourself a favour and investigate XDebug, and an IDE like PhpStorm that can take advantage of it. It will change your workflow for the better.
The first thing I do with any new framework (which I did with Laravel a few weeks back) is set up a really simple Hello World app and then step through a request loop, start to finish, to get a feel for how the framework sets up a request, dispatches it, and then tears down..
Just from that first exercise, I am immediately more productive with the new codebase..
Furthermore Laravel 4 uses the whoops error framework - which provides very in depth errors.