Web Services are a standard and are devised to be used by any platform. If you only got back COM objects, then web services would be useless for Unix-based systems. In addition, .NET doesn't do COM natively. There is a COM interop layer.

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>Really?... I thought that it was the purpose of SOAP to 'transform' arguments to XML on the way out to a web service, transform it from XML (to regular arguments) for use by the web service itself, transform the return value(s) (from the web service) to XML and finally transform the XML return value(s) back to 'regular' value(s) for the benefit of the caller. All this so that regular COM objects could be deployed as web services.
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>What am I mis-understanding?
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