You can do everything you can do with wget - and more - with curl (though it seems to be tending downward on that graph... not very sure what may be the reason for that).
Nice text on HTTP scripting: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/httpscripting.html
And a total aside: http://ifconfig.me/ is extremely awesome. I probably end up using 'curl ifconfig.me' about once a day at least.