In order to continue on our path of development with the browser pages, we need to decide on the services structure rather sooner than later (rather, since I'm building new pages: now).
The goal of having a webservice API is to allow development of a broader ecosystem of service-using applications. In addition, we're more and more moving to a rich browser-based webapplication ourselves; rich-client web application frameworks expect to integrate with a backend service through web-services.