There has been a lot of debate as of late as to whether Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) can truly pave the path to SOA.
Scripps Networks -- parent company of HGTV and The Food Network among other things -- isn't worrying about the debate, and is pressing forward with service oriented architecture -- via the open-source Mule ESB. According to a statement, the ESB implementation "gives the company’s IT staff the flexibility and agility to meet the converging needs of the media business, as well as handle potential system errors."
The rise of open source ESBs -- such as that Scripps is using -- is creating an interesting new dimension to the ESB-or-not-to-ESB question. Namely, it is providing integration capabilities to underserved parts of the market. And, it is shielded from the criticism that ESBs represent costly entrees for vendors to push their products into enterprises.
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Your analysis is mis-guided. Mule is not a ESB - it is a service container without any bus capabilities. The scope of a service interaction is limited to the transformation capabilities within a single virtual machine requiring a hub and spoke model, not a bus model of integration. A bus is critical in distributed service interactions at the enterprise level, but there is too much confusion over providers who call their products ESBs.