POPULAR SCIENCE: PROS AND CONS?

Since the so called "popular science" trend has something like an intuitive appeal to quite a lot of people where is the line between the superficial and the professional? I was just wandering, some professional physicists make a whole bunch of money by writing pop-scince books and the usual accusation is that the innocent laymen get all sorts of wrong impressions about the subject. How professional then all these books should be, facing the fact that getting closer to the "real stuff" would repulse most potential readers because of the incomprehensible language.