proxing services exposed on localhost requires the services to be written in JBossWS
Sorry, but this is not true. If you mean that to proxy a service within the same VM then that is certainly the case by default.
trying to proxy a localhost service will cause the Server Restart to Freeze.
Proxying a webservice within the same VM, over HTTP, will freeze as the web endpoints are not enabled until the server has started, there is a valve within the web server which controls this. You can, however, workaround this by using the internal notation.
if the remote service is temporarily unavailable, the whole service containing the SOAP-Proxy will fail deploying
Yes, this is deliberate at present because we publish the derived WSDL and validate the configuration at that point. As mentioned earlier in the week though, this is easy to work around by using a local copy of the WSDL and will give you the behaviour you require.
Kev