I talk about services and actors interchangeably because there's no interesting differences between them.

Other than automatic handling of network exceptions, safe failiures and the shitton of other features Erlang runtimes have?

I'm not sure what you're talking about. What automatic handling of network exceptions? What safe failures? BEAM has lots of great features, no question, but they have very little to do with the implementation of actors - BEAM primarily provides names and linking as useful primitives.