I'm having trouble discerning what the meaning of "launching" is when most people talk about it. Is it as simple as deploying something to a production server?

I'm having trouble discerning what the meaning of "launching" is when most people talk about it. Is it as simple as deploying something to a production server? Or trying to get one more feature in that initial release? Either way, there is no excuse for soft launching now if you have any working code.