It's an important work in and of itself. If you ever heard of the idea of the "meme" (a self replicating bit of information much like a "gene" but normally called an idea) this is where that idea was born. It leads to a whole new way of viewing culture and human thought.
Dawkins just slapped a scientific-sounding name on a phenomenon well-familiar to linguistics, historians of ideas, and others in humanistic or sociological fields. Another (IHT?) article on Dawkins admits in detail the failures of the mimetics field. Wish I'd kept the link, I think I found it through aldaily.org.