> ...having been through that SOAP pain it's being compared to, I'd say there's not even a comparison
OK, that is indeed the most usual response to "Why REST?". The main reason why people like REST is "because SOAP". It's a false dichotomy that the industry has fallen for.
Oh, yeah, and you can run the GETs directly in your browser/cURL. I like that part too, but it only gives you so much.
REST is more of a philosophy, than a standard. Hence everyone does it differently, and you have no chance to use the same library to talk REST with multiple different services (unless you make that library an overcomplicated beast).
XMLRPC? It's a universal standard, that is just a few pages long and everyone can grasp it in their lunch break. Nobody would complain that your API is not "XMLRPC enough". It works (almost) the same way everywhere. You can get the XMLRPC library that's been built in since Python 2.2 and be reasonably sure that you are going to be able to talk to a random modern XMLRPC API. You'd have other such libraries for every major language. Ditto for JSONRPC, if XML sounds too scary (though it doesn't really matter much - it's a mostly transparent implementation detail).
I'd wish people would stop bringing up SOAP as an excuse for REST. Yes, it was worse, but that does not mean that REST is particularly good.