What is SOA? Huh?

John Cavnar-Johnson responds to Clemens questioning the point of A in SOA.
Clemens is talking about SOA being about edges and not about the internal 'architecture' (in the sense of the buildings) such as protocols, control flow et al. Facade is everything and internally it could be implemented anyway the developer figures out as long as it sticks to the PEACE tenets. Service orientation is about answering the shortcomings of DCOM and CORBA and other technologies which, by themselves, served the purpose famously but in interop failed to deliver miserably.
John thinks that there is an 'architecture' to account for in the first place if you want service orientation.
I think Microsoft is trying to architecture space with the architecture center's offerings of prescriptive architecture guides to let you figure out the rest of the software building blocks. Combining these 'architecture' blocks and overall service orientation is probably would get us SO+.
I guess I dont know what the heck is SOA. Then again, is it possible that I was using SOA when I was doing DCOM development? (except for interop though)...
In the words of my generation, (ok not so much my generation).. whatever..