Pat,
No appology needed, if you don't ask the question you'll never know the answer
a web service is esentailly a set of methods than can be acessed via a http
adress, these methods then return an stream of xml data to the caller.
In the case of InfoPath this allows you to maintain your data connections
and complex business logic centrally on your network rather than in a form
template that is stored on the users machine.
The reason this is recommended to users of InfoPath is because InfoPath
directly supports connection to a web service.

for more info you can check out
http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/webservices/understanding/default.aspx

I hope this helps

Cheers
Ben Walters