TCP provides reliable streams, which IP doesn't. HTTP takes those reliable streams and provides... what, exactly? I guess it turns the streams into request/resp

TCP provides reliable streams, which IP doesn't. HTTP takes those reliable streams and provides... what, exactly? I guess it turns the streams into request/response message pairs (with lots of extra headers), but that's not nearly as useful - especially since parsing messages out of a stream really isn't harder than understanding the contents of the messages themselves.