I had the same idea, and my approach let me to create WWW::Mechanize::Shell, together with HTML::Display, which allow semi-natural browsing via the command line and still have a browser available to render the resulting pages. It's not perfect and suffers from the same JavaScript pitfalls as the IE solution does, but it works nicely enough to easily get a skeleton script for automating http/web tasks.

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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