MSDN top 10
Phillip Pearson: Having never done anything with SOAP before, I thought I might as well start here and hack up a Python wrapper for the service. Presenting: microsoft_com.py.
Cool!
I took that as a starting point, focused on a single operation (top 10 popular en-US downloads) and removed all references to any toolkit or XML parser. Here's the result.
Clearly the bulk of the logic is the handling of Web Services Security UsernameToken. Extending this to support other services would not be difficult.