[bitcrazed]

You're conflating two things here:

Remote Procedure Calls have many implementations. CORBA and Java implement RMI, Microsoft implemented DCOM. And for serializing API calls, they do great.

However, what's REALLY hard about remote object systems like CORBA, COM+, etc. is reliably managing object lifetime semantics. It turns out that trying to manage stateful object lifetime via an inherently unreliable network connection is tricky, if not impossible.

All the reliability semantics, security infrastructure, etc. layered on top add considerable processing cost.

By comparison sending text back and forth via networks, and/or tunneling pipes (e.g. ssh) is a piece of cake.