CAP is not applicable here from what I can tell. Glad to know Coda Hale understands it though. Sounds like a real nice guy.
While I guess almost all systems built on top of heroku almost by definition needs to be distributed in some way heroku itself doesn't need to be. (Not saying it isn't.)
Yes, it does.
How does consistency apply here for example?
This is problematic because the convergence times for state like "connection counts" between load balancers in different datacenters could be significantly higher than the rate at which that state itself is changing, and the cost to getting that state wrong is significantly higher latencies. That's where you start having to make CAP and latency tradeoffs.