> The difference is that many people have worked on highly functional "real agile" teams and can tell the tale.

Sure, but is it really the "agility" or the people making the difference?

The highly functional teams I've worked on either ignored or satirized the elements of Agile development (e.g. the "story" format, story points, any sincere effort at estimation poker) to get out of those discussions as quickly as possible. This probably bears some similarity to how the original "Agile" developers dealt with the preceding methodologies.