I've gone through the entire Howling Fjord zone so far and am currently working on Borean Tundra. There are quite a few collection quests overall but honestly I don't think its any more than BC, and the drop rates are DEFINITELY better than the drop rates in BC.

I don't know why people expected something else - pre 3.0 xp nerf BC required quite a bit of instancing to not have to do collection quests, northrend seems about the same, the difference is some of th ecollection quests are a lot faster/easier.