Definition of Service Oriented Architecture?

Looking around online, most of the definitions of SOA that I find are inextricably tied to language neutrality and remoteability. Under those guidelines, SOA is restricted to solutions like SOAP.

I find that too restricting. The goals of SOA (as I define it) are to enhance reuse and manage complexity. A key way to achieve both of these is to remove statefulness. When objects don't have individual state, they are easier to combine together ... because state implies that there is an order of operations that gets in the way of easily combining services together to form more powerful services.

In HiveMind, services may have state ... but there's a cost on any application that makes use of internal state.

Remoteability is another holy grail that costs more than it gives back. EJB's local object support is an admission that remoteability of services is the exception, rather than the rule, and that a container is useful even if objects are shared within a single JVM.

When a service needs to be remote ... go for it! XML over HTTP or even full-blown SOAP is appropriate. But once the gears start turning inside your application, keep it all in the same JVM. A common maxim I've heard and used is "XML at the edges"--meaning that XML is an inefficient format (especially in the flexible, dynamic Java environment) to represent data in within your application, but is a good choice when presenting an external face to your application. I'd extend that to "Remote access at the edges" as well.