Further investigation today of NAV 2009's web-service architecture has lead to some amazing findings.

First there's abstraction,  something like get me a list of all items on an Item Card can be expressed as simply as -

        public test[] GetAll(int rowsback)
         {
            test_Filter[] filters = new test_Filter[0];
            return Binding.Find(filters, "", rowsback);

        }

Need to mass insert a load of records? -

       public void BulkInsert(test[] rec)
       {
           Binding.InsertAll(ref rec);
       }

Need to quickly locate a record from its key? -

       public test GetSingular(string no)
       {
           return Binding.Get(no);
       }

Just think how much SQL you'd need to type to achieve this...   Furthermore its all strongly typed, validated and all mapped correctly.

This is truly staggering.   Performance even on machine with 2gb of ram running Virtual PC, Visual Studio 2008, Mobile Device Emulator manager seems pretty good too.