Not always. I recently bought an Ikea coffee table, and was surprised to find that my laser mouse does not work accurately on it. It does work, to a degree, but the cursor skips around the screen a lot, so it's clearly not properly tracking the surface. I put down a mouse pad and all is well again, so it's definitely an issue with the Ikea table and not something else like Bluetooth range, battery charge, etc.
The coffee table in question is the Lack, and the mouse is the Apple Bluetooth Mighty Mouse, if anyone wants to try to re-create this.