Richard Searle has a blog post entitled The SOAP retrieval anti-pattern where he writes

I have seen systems that use SOAP based Web Services only to implement data retrievals.

The concept is to provide a standardized mechanism for external systems to retrieve data from some master system that controls the data of interest. This has value in that it enforces a decoupling from the master systems data model. It can also be easy to manage and control than the alternative to allowing the consuming systems to directly query the master systems database tables.
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The selection of a SOAP interface over a RESTful interface is also questionable. The SOAP interface has a few (generally one) parameters and then returns a large object. Such an interface with a single parameter has a trivial representation as a GET. A multi-parameter call can also be trivial mapped if the parameters define a conceptual heirarchy (eg the ids of a company and one of its employees).

Such a GET interface avoids all the complexities of SOAP, WSDL, etc. AJAX and XForm clients can trivially and directly use the interface. A browser can use XSLT to provide a human readable representation.

Performance can easily be boosted by interposing a web cache. Such optimization would probably occur essentially automatically since any significant site would already have caching. Such caching can be further enhanced by using the HTTP header timestamps to compare against the updated timestamps in the master system tables.

I agree 100%, web services that use SOAP solely for data retrieval are usually a sign that the designers of the service need to get a clue when it comes to building distributed applications for the Web.

PS: I realize that my employer has been guilty of this in the past. In fact, we've been known to do this at MSN as well although at least we also provided RESTful interfaces to the service in that instance. ;)