Info says my network is disabled, yet working fine.

After looking at a recent question (#84674) concerning networks not working, out of curiosity I executed, on my system
sudo lshw -C network
[sudo] password for joe:
  *-network DISABLED
       description: Ethernet interface
       physical id: 1
       logical name: vboxnet0
       serial: 0a:00:27:00:00:00
       capabilities: ethernet physical
       configuration: broadcast=yes multicast=yes

The response says the network is disabled, yet my metwork seems to be working fine. I can see all the computers on my network from all of the machines, and the internet is working just fine. There is nothing in the "man" page on this information. I am running Karmic, but I never executed this before on Jaunty, so I have nothing to compare it with. I am connected to a Linksys router via ethernet, and the other computers in my network are wireless connections. I guess I'm wondering what the disabled really means.