I've been playing around with NewSoftSerial and it's been working pretty well for me, with only a few difficulties so far. Thanks for your great work packaging up a bunch of different ideas, mikalhart.
A few notes:
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I've experienced some problems doing the same sort of serial pass-through, where you just echo characters between the softserial pins and the UART. If the device I'm speaking to on the softserial port is set to echo, no matter how slowly I type I am liable to get garbage characters interspersed with what I'm typing. Turning off echo and having everything run half duplex gives pretty good results. Could this be because pins 2 and 3 (used very often in the soft serial examples I've seen) share an interrupt with the UART on pins 0 and 1? Unfortunately, my device requires a specially designed shield so I can't move pin assignments around easily, but if someone who is having interrupt problems could try using, say, pins 8 and 9 for the soft serial and see if they continue to have problems, that would be an interesting experiment.
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Another problem I've had is when I get a whole slew of characters sent back from the serial device, it quickly fills the buffer and I lose the rest of the data, even when I'm not doing hardly anything else in the main loop other than trying to handle the input. I'm looking into adding proper RTS/CTS handling as an option to NewSoftSerial to see if that helps. There's an attempt at CTS handling in the AF_XPort code, but it doesn't seem to work properly for me.