  (abridged) The soft excess seen in the X-ray spectra of many high mass
accretion rate AGN can be well modelled by reflection from a partially ionised
accretion disc. However, the derived parameters are often extreme, both in
terms of the underlying spacetime and the reflection geometry, and these models
require that the disc is far from hydrostatic equilibrium. An alternative model
uses similarly partially ionised, velocity smeared material but seen in
absorption, though again the derived velocities are extreme, requiring magnetic
driving (in the jet?) rather than a simple line driven disc wind. We find that
while both models give comparably good fits to XMM--Newton data, we favour the
absorption model as, unlike reflection, all the derived spectral indices are
soft. This is as expected by analogy with the correspondingly high mass
accretion rate stellar mass black holes. Furthermore, these X-ray spectra are
consistent with a one--to--one mapping between AGN type and spectral state,
with NLS1's having softer spectra corresponding to the very high state, while
the broad line AGN have Gamma~2 as expected for the high/soft state. We also
use the simultaneous OM data to derive the ratio of disc to total accretion
power which is another tracer of spectral state in X-ray binaries. This does
not always show that the disc in NLS1's contributes less than 80 per cent of
the total power, as expected for a very high state. We suggest that this is an
artifact of the standard disc models used to determine the disc luminosity in
our fits. The disc seen in the very high state of black hole binaries is often
observed to be distorted from the standard shape, and a similar effect in
NLS1's could recover the correspondance between black hole binary spectral
state and AGN type.
