Gladwell does a tremendous job of cherry picking bits of information to form a compelling narrative. I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient data to be intellectually dishonest.
Such as...?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758542
I generally find him entertaining but always take anything I read by him with a grain of salt.
But I'll come out and say what I hinted at elsewhere in this thread: I really wish Gladwell had bothered to tie together the threads between PARC, Alan Kay, Smalltalk, Objective-C, the iPad, the Scratch app being banned and Apple's vision of app-store-based-computing. It seems to me that he really missed out on a exactly the kind of cherry-picking and narrative forming he's good at, and in this case I think there might be a pretty interesting story buried in there. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the history to know if there really is, and it's likely it wouldn't have really worked in the New Yorker.