Than you for this explanation - it helped me understand why I tend to enjoy and get more out of books of this nature. I've liked Gladwell's books, at least the ones I've read. Deep Work by Cal Newport is another book that is frequently characterized as being "an article unnecessarily expanded into a book by padding it out with redundant examples", but I really loved that book as well. Done properly, the repeated examples and stories help reinforce the idea and provide different contexts and viewpoints of the same core concept.

Thanks to you, I'll no longer feel nerd guilt for thinking highly of books like this :)