How practical are Test Sockets?
Those sockets to which you refer would require soldering as well, anyway; how do you think the socket gets attached to the board? They're useful in a few cases, and I can see them being useful for breakout boards for SOIC or TSSOP parts, but not for QFP or BGA parts; any given socket would only fit exactly one package type, whereas you can easily use an SOIC-20 socket for an SOIC-8 part.