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NancyLebovitz comments on The metaphor/myth of general intelligence - Less Wrong
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I note also KnaveOfAllTrades' recent post about the analogous concept of a "sports quotient".
I think a sports quotient is a bad counterexample, because it's pretty obvious there is a sports quotient: take someone who weighs 500 pounds, and another person who weighs 150; who do you think is going to win most of the time if you have them play tennis, basketball, sprinting, crosscountry running, archery, soccer...? Similarly, if someone has a gimp leg, they're going to perform badly at pretty much any sport, from table tennis (gotta stand and move around) to boxing.
Wide range of body types for Olympic athletes
A sports quotient isn't a totally crazy idea, but I think it makes more sense as "can play a number of sports reasonably well" measurement rather than measuring the likelihood of achieving excellence at any sport.
I recommend The Sports Gene for an overview of the physical qualities needed for excellent performance. It used to be believed that the ideal athlete was someone with a classic intermediate build, but the more modern approach is to look for athletes whose bodies are at an optimum for particular sports.
They have a wide range of body types... for elite world-class one-out-of-millions competition, where even the tiniest differences like favorable genetic mutations make a difference. This in no way disproves the idea of an SQ, any more than grades in a math graduate course outpredicting an IQ test for who will win a Fields Medal would disprove the idea of an IQ test.
Generally speaking, it's usually possible to devise a test for a specific field which outperforms an IQ test, adds predictive value above and beyond IQ. What's interesting about IQ is how general it is, how early in life it starts being useful, and how most good field-specific tests will subsume or partially measure IQ as well.
The other surprising thing about IQ is how early it was invented.