Even though we did some similar comparison before starting the chapter, it is time to recapitulate what we said and compare it with what you noted by yourself. Laravel belongs to the type of framework that allows you to create great things with very little work. It contains all the components that you, as a web developer, will ever need. There has to be some good reason for how fast it became the most popular framework of the year!
On the other hand, Silex is a microframework, which by itself does very little. It is just the skeleton on which you can build the framework that you exactly need. It already provides quite a lot of service providers, and we did not discuss even half of them; we recommend you to visit http://silex.sensiolabs.org/doc/providers.html for the full list. However, if you prefer, you can always add other dependencies with Composer and use them. If, for some reason, you stop liking the ORM or the template engine that you use, or it just happens that...