There is definitely some of that. After all the book is targeted towards a popular audience. But that being said there are a couple of remarkably original ideas.
For example, going from least to most intersting:
1. Statistically speaking a child is much more likely to drown in a swimming pool than be killed by a gun (of course, corrected for socioeconomic status and all the standard stuff.) Yet we see countless campaigns against gun violence with the argument that x number of kids get killed due to guns, and none for "swimming pool safety" or a host of other things that are far more likely to kill you.
2. There is a study of a daycare center where a problem they were dealing with was parents picking up kids late. So the daycare instituted fines. The result was more parents picking up their kids late. Why? because after conducting interviews they found that the guilt associated with being late was more of a motivator than the small fine. Having paid the fine, the parents no longer felt as bad about being late. That's a very conterintuitive result if you ask me.
3. The famous abortion-crime link. The idea being that the legalization of abortion in the 70s is what caused the massive decrease in violent crime in the 90s. Very convincingly argued. And certainly presents a better theory than The Tipping Point.
I think several of the stories in it have been debunked. I remember at least reading that the story about the drug dealer turned out to be a hoax - unknown to the authors of the book, but I was disappointed to not at least find a statement regarding the issue on their homepage.
Freakonomics is a great book because it introduces fundamental principles of economics on intuitive grounds. So you're not talking about incentives with respect to society or some other abstract entity, but with respect to specific cases.
Plus, as I mentioned above, it's an extremely fun read. Very well written and the ideas presented are definitely compelling. I'd recommend to go as far as to read the original research papers that the book is based on. Especially the abortion-crime one.
