Very true and a good explanation of DDoS but I was talking about DoS generally, not specifically DDoS. In my (admittedly pretty limited) experience, a single mega request which is not blocked or rejected by your server can cause it to choke. If you don't have sufficient redundancy or if you get several of these requests coming through it can take down some of your backend services.
It's a good point though, there are lots of different attack vectors each fun in their own way that you need to watch out for.