One of my favorite tricks with REST is sending a complete, bug-reproduction to a vendor as a simple one-line curl command. No arguing back and forth, just tell me when this curl command works properly.
Not a SOAP advocate by any means, but there's nothing stopping you from sending a curl command with an xml payload to a soap endpoint
Spose you're right, but I've never tickled a SOAP interface with curl. I fire up a python script when I need to do even the most basic interaction with a SOAP endpoint because, as Dustin Hoffman says in Hook, "Brace yourself lad, because this is really going to hurt."
I tend to go with RPC style apis with JSON/Protofbuf payloads for most things these days. IMHO it's the best of both worlds.