SOA and Newton versus Einstein's universe

I really enjoyed Pat's analogy of SOA being like Einsteins view rather than Newtons view of the universe. Its a great way to think of the difference in approaches.

It seems for highly loaded systems that we are increasingly we're moving away from the XA and transactional approaches to looser definitions of consistency (caching/dirty reads, alternative locking models, compensating transactions rather than commit/rollback). I liked Pats hotel room reservation example as well; its rather like Gregor's coffee shop example for asynchrony and loose coupling when ordering coffee without requiring XA.