Loosely-coupled deployment vs loosely-coupled design

I have talked to a number of people who claim to be doing SOA, when in the end all they do is loosely-coupled design. Let me explain what I mean by an example.

A team of enterprise architects was designing an SOA infrastructure for a bank I know. The system they were building would be based on interfaces, so that it would be possible to deploy parts of the system as separate instances later on. This was their notion of SOA…

The good thing about it is that there are interfaces in their design, meaning it is likely to be loosely-coupled. The bad news is that this is not SOA, at least not in my view: one of the biggest advantages of SOA - reuse in place - is never realized in this way. So, whereas this approach to 'SOA' may be loosely coupled in design, it is not loosely coupled in deployment (which is at least as important).

The consequence? Whenever a 'service' is upgraded, they will need to upgrade all the dependent services and redeploy them. This is because each 'service' is really an embedded module inside other parts of the system.

I guess this also holds for the debate on cloud vs grid computing: in my view, a cloud is more loosely coupled than a grid in its deployment.