I still believe that there are things to be learned by such comparisons however.

Oh definitely.

A recent example would be agile software development methodologies like XP, Crystal and Scrum. They've got a lot in common with lean manufacturing processes that companies like Toyota have been refining for decades. Once people got over the misconception of how they imagined manufacturing processes worked there was (and still is) a lot to learn.

If you're interested in this stuff The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production and Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit are good reads.

The problem is that people keep trying to learn the wrong lessons through popular misconceptions of how other industries work.