What I find neat about the story of the Samaritan woman is that Jesus was honoring the woman by asking her to serve him. I recently took a seminar with a missionary who's lived and worked in Islamic cultures for decades and he explained that in Semitic cultures, you honor someone by accepting their hospitality. So by asking this person who was not only female but Samaritan to give him a drink, Jesus was shaking her out of her accustomed categories and inviting her to listen to him.

I also heard N.T. Wright preach on this passage last week, and sadly I didn't take notes on the exegetical half of it, but I do remember him saying that his responses to the woman's irrelevant questions were designed to make her realize that what she needed most was right before her eyes. Like, "Dude, why ask which mountain you should worship on when the Messiah is RIGHT HERE?"