REST DataService... it was so... obvious?

Hi!
When I built my first systems using .NET 1.0 (back in the year 2002), I was excited with the idea of using "XML SOAP WebServices" to communicate my client side application with my remote side business logic... but, after I started developing it, I realized I had to do a lot of stuff that just seemed repetitive and hard to use, why did I have to create a WebMethod for each of the CRUD operations... and many for the "R" in CRUD for each possible "select" variation... and it was even more problematic because sometimes I just had to have a "dynamic querying UI" and couldn't find a good way to send the definition of a query in a good "XML" way...
Then I realized... why should I create a method for each variant? why not just have a single web method:

DataSet executeQuery(string Query)

And I started changing all my code, anything that I wanted to obtain from the server could be obtained that way... (but... I started wondering... is that the one and only true way to use data oriented web services? I remember reading somewhere that wasn't such a good idea.. that SOA wasn't invented for that.. after all, that was just a thin XML wrapper over my ADO.NET data provider...)

Fast forward a few years.... a lot of people start talking about a doctoral dissertation written by Roy Fielding... and the reach the following conclusion "SOAP is just too complex" ,"Having to create a different web method for each action makes the interface complex and not that good for inter operation", "one needs to know too much to understand a SOAP web service because methods are not standard", "WSDL is too complex", "SOAP is going against the resource naming philosophy in HTTP", etc, etc.... And REST is the answer to all our problems...

Well here I am taking a look to the experimental REST Framework "Astoria" Microsoft is creating, and... it looks painfully similar to DataSet executeQuery(string Query), but it has a difference... it is not using SQL... it is using a custom ad hoc querying mechanism... that... does the same things SQL does?.. Perhaps it will implement better some relational features that are badly designer in SQL but... what is the real advantage here? what is the real difference between this and a SOAP web services that receives SQL and returns an XML representing rows in a database?

Is there really a difference? or it just that we (as an industry) needed to invent SOAP webservices to realize all we needed was a thin XML wrapper around SQL?

Update: Astoria is now known as WCF DataServices