Principal Architect can mean literally anything, and in many more enterprisey places guys with such titles are often basically wankers who don't contribute much or are even a net negative for the company. And yes, in such cases getting to this role is all about appearances and politics. This is confirmed by the market when such guy has to leave the company for whatever reason and cannot get another job that is even remotely close in pay and ostensible responsibility.

A good rule of thumb on the value of the architect is IMO whether they can even check out, build and run the code. The kind of people I'm talking about often didn't even bother to get privileges to version control; they reside strictly in email&powerpoint land.