In writing labs for an upcoming Microsoft Course, I found that the limitations on my environment was less than satisfactory to run all of the services of SharePoint 2010 at the same time. Even though all Web Application and app pools were running, I was getting WCF timeouts mainly for the User Profile Service. The default timeout value in SharePoint for the services is pretty much set to 20 sec. If you have a machine that doesn't have the full 8GB of memory needed, then you may find your services are taking a while to spin up. This can be devistating to some of the setup/install things you may be doing (because there are still many things that are NOT transnational).
I found that by increasing the WCF timeout, I could avoid a lot of setup/install problems (mainly around service applications like User Profile). To change the WCF timeout, open the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebClients\Profile\client.config file, update the Bindings to double the timeout from "00:00:20" to "00:00:40". Bam! Your user profile won't timeout all the time and the service management page will display!
Chris