I think this is not coincidental. COP will be truly viable when combined with language evolution. We are not there yet, but there are some promising ideas. I agree that components should be as loosely coupled to the programming language as they are to the consuming code for any particular language. In my opinion, however, programming language neutrality is less a consideration than data provider neutrality.
Programming languages come and go - the database lasts forever.
MTS support more languages, but at the expense of having less backend flexibility. As for the link about the problems with EJB, there are a number of valid criticisms. Also, the idea that SOAP is somehow in the same classification is ridiculous - being nothing more than an RPC mechanism with no distributed garbage collection. Having sort of a DBA past, I like your comment re databases. Alas, I think things are much more complicated than what you imply.