So I don't know what it's like in Finland, but here in Australia:
Therapy dogs are basically dogs that are trained to be very cuddly. If you're upset, they'll come over and snuggle you. Basically they're interchangeable, almost, with emotional support dogs. They're there to make their owners feel better, not to perform a concrete task. In public you can't usually distinguish them from normal dogs. They might wear a vest claiming they're a service dog because a lot of people do that to their emotional support animals, but if you take away the vest you'd have no way of knowing what they are because they're generally roaming around sniffing things or whatever. Therapy dogs may be professionally trained, but not to the level of service dogs.
Service dogs are trained by professionals, and are working dogs. You will know a service dog from other dogs because of their body language. They are very disciplined, they act like soldiers in that they can act like they're standing to attention. They don't wander like other dogs do, they don't whine, they don't vocalise, they stay glued to their owner's side and are paying close attention to them. If their owner is sitting down they'll lie down beside them, at their feet, or under their chair. A lot of the time you won't notice they're there. You do NOT touch these dogs because they're working and cannot be distracted in case their owner is about to have a seizure/blood glucose drops/has a PTSD attack/about to have a migraine - etc. You're not supposed to even talk to them in case you distract them, you need to pretend they're not there. They are trained to very high standards because if they falter once, their owner could have a medical emergency or otherwise be in for a VERY bad time.
I'm not saying that service dogs are like that 24/7, because they do go "off duty". They get tired, they hit their limits, they get sick and have bad days. But usually this downtime is at home, and when they're in public they're working to make sure nothing happens to their owners when they're out, so if you're not at their home they're switched on and you can really see the difference in body language.
For the person I mentioned in the above post, she was calling her dog a service dog but he was wandering around all over the place and she didn't give a fuck when people walked up to him and patted him or interacted with him. Rule number one of service dogs is you do NOT do that, nor do you as an owner allow it because it can fuck with their ability to notice when something goes wrong, and can undermine their training. The penny didn't drop until she later called him a therapy dog and I realised that she thought the terms were interchangeable.
Meanwhile I work in healthcare and I have seen service dogs there. Those guys are laser focused. One startled me because it was sitting so quietly under its owner's chair that my brain wrote it off as a bag or a jumper or something until it moved a bit and I realised that it was a dog. When I talked to its owner it barely acknowledged me. It didn't have a vest on but you could tell it was locked in.
Service dogs do need to be made more accessible to the disabled and to many people, training your own dog to do minor tasks can be the closest you'd ever get, but home-grown emotional support animals are not anywhere near the same level as service dogs because the people training them are not, themselves, trained to do it well or to maintain the dog's training to those standards. For professionally trained therapy dogs, they're not held to the same standards either, they're just trained to comfort people. If she really did have a service animal, by allowing people to pat him she's basically teaching him it's okay to get distracted and stop watching her and that his tasks aren't important. You don't want to let that happen in a service dog.
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