Gladwell is kinda famous, written a couple of best sellers and stuff.
That said opinions on him vary, his primary MO is to tell the audience something that contradicts common knowledge and provide enough facts to back it up, thereby making his audience feel smarter, which people love.
On the other hand it's often just enough facts, and it's often technically true but a very shallow truth.
Since a writing class I took was probably one of my favorite courses in college, I used to hold writers in high regard as creative people.
Not anymore. For example, what Gladwell just wrote simply illustrates that he has no knowledge whatsoever of how creative process works. For one, all creativity is tweaking. Einstein obtained his relativity theory by basically iteratively tweaking known theories and some others until they looked good enough and fit the observed facts. Not trying to diminish what Einstein did in any way -- very few people if any at the time would have been able to tweak just the right equations. In addition, that iterative tweaking Einstein did required a helluva lot of thinking, something Gladwell surely didn't bother with.
Getting back to Gladwell -- I hope it is clear now that what one ends up with is a world-famous writer who doesn't understand creativity yet manages to write with an "intellectual" voice and publish in The New Yorker.
This is very troubling.
Barely any visual artist or sculptor or architect or even a musician one could name would fall into the category of those who don't understand how creative process works. Yet writers routinely do fall into that category. Not all writers, I'm sure -- I bet Shakespeare knew a few things about creative process that he could teach even Jobs. Yet a disturbingly large proportion of writers -- like 80% of them have no idea what they are talking about when they are talking about creativity.
Only goes to show that one doesn't necessarily need to be creative to speak or write well -- it is enough to serve as a relatively dumb medium through which a fixed language (invented by someone else) passes through.
Some people have this naive romantic notion that you basically go through some period of "suffering" as an artist and then suddenly you have some "grand vision" unfolding in front of you that's hidden to everybody else. What they miss is all the boring, often tweaking-like work that you have to perform before you are faced with that vision. Suffering without doing work doesn't lead to anything.
It's the copywriter who produces the creative concepts in an advertising agency. Those commercials you see and those taglines/slogans you remember? Those were the brainchild of a copywriter sitting at a desk somewhere, mulling over ideas, soaking up culture and transforming it into a memorable view of that culture. The copywriter imagines. Then documents. Then edits. Then reimagines. Then lets a bunch of others give their opinions. Then edits some more.
Not sure what writers you've come across, but you might want to ease up on making sweeping statements about all - or even 80% of writers. Oh, and most working writers -- the ones who aren't starving -- are hard workers who don't believe in climbing the mystic mountain to seek out the Muse, as you describe.