The funny thing is that the point of XPLC is that it doesn't have that ("XPLC" stands for "Cross-Platform Lightweight Components"), on the account that simpler is better, and that we'd see more component-based software if the overhead of turning a library into a component wouldn't be orders of magnitude worse than a regular library. XPLC doesn't do out-of-process objects or method interception so that it has bounded method invocation overhead (C++ virtual call level of performance), it doesn't have many other features so that it is really easy to make an application that uses components or to make new components.
There is also a similar phenomenon with multithreading, where making an application (often a network I/O-bound one) multithreaded instantly makes it "better". As alan said: "A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program state machines."
It seems that people want technology that has sex appeal, a simple technology that do what they want easily and quickly just isn't enough.
But nobody can tell me of a really popular distributed application beside the Sun NFS/NIS family.