I don't know anyone who is going into "abdominal surgery" - last time I checked that's not a surgical subspecialty.
In acute care/emergency general surgery - you will often operate in the abdomen. Cholecystectomy is the most common (or second most common, depending on the source) abdominal operation performed in the US so it is unsurprising that you have seen several of these (*I don't know any med student who has scrubbed in on more than a hundred of anything while on their rotations...but that's another issue). There is a wide range of abdominal pathology that you will see from consults for "abdominal pain" including but not limited to appendicitis, diverticulitis, bowel perforation, volvulus, ulcer disease, obstruction (of widely varying etiologies including malignancy), bleeding, and a hundred others that I'm not going to rattle off. The operations can actually be quite diverse and interesting.
I love operating in the belly. No one that I know loves the smell of succus or stool, but I can honestly say at this point it just usually doesn't bother me. I've done some crazy operations and been exposed to interesting pathology that I had to that point only read about in a textbook. And I've only been doing it for 3 years.
There are other specialties that operate in the abdomen - bariatric/MIS surgeons where the appeal is getting to do complex laparoscopy all the time; colorectal surgery where the appeal is again complex laparoscopy as well as a wide variety of office based/outpatient procedures and "big whacks" for pelvic/rectal cancer; surgical oncologists who do complex liver, biliary, gastric, and pancreatic resections.
In other words...there's a lot to love.
