Well, I don't know about you but to me anything that listens to a port or socket and can be queried to perform one task or another is a daemon.
A WebService is no difference.
You'll realize what I mean when your Apache-based WebService will be the subject to DoS for the first time. Not a real attack of course, no one would bother to do that.
Maybe it will be a glitch in the server script itself, in the requesting client, a malformed request maybe or a high server-load at the time of the request. You name it.
At sometime something will happen that will cause a problem. If you run that on Apache (or any other webserver), your site itself might get inaccessible, memory might leak and other things.
Even if you manage to do the stunt to create the first fault-free piece of code in the world, every single connection to your WebService will bind a Apache child-process to it, taking up several megabytes in RAM, spamming your harddisk with useless logging entries and denying that very Apache child-process to more relevant tasks, namely serving HTML.
Create a 5-line script that will spawn an endless amount of SOAP clients or perform time-consuming queries, connecting to your Apache-based WebService and Port 80 de facto will go offline. The list is endless.
But form the impression you give me, you prefer to find all that out the hard way.
Good luck then,
Sal-
