There is no magic.

That's the conclusion of Terry Coatta's writeup on the demise of CORBA:

http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=491

We think of SOA as being a paradigm shift; it's actually an improvement which provides greater flexibility than CORBA and others, but the old rules still apply. Distributed computing is still hard, in general.