I install and remove 1206 components and SOIC ICs at work all day. SOIC has pin centers on 50 mils, half the standard DIP IC we've all come to know and love. The fancy stuff, like hot air removal systems, are nice, but not necessary for small chips, like 14 and 16 pinners. A decent pair of solder tweezers will do these as well as components. You can buy broader tips that bridge all the pins at once. 20 pins and larger start to get hard. Use flux and thin copper braid to get most of the solder off. Then apply lots of flux and go pin to pin with your soldering iron and a fine probe. Heat the pin while QUICKLY prying the pin up. Take too long to do this and the pad comes up with the pin (or,worse yet, off!). Installing SMT chips is easy to do with a standard gun, 20 to 40Watts, using a standard tip. Be sure it's ESD (ElectroStatic Discharge) proof. ESD will kill a CMOS chip fast. Worse, it could could just weaken the chip and make it erratic or intermittent, a technician's nightmare.
I've seen people recommend preheating the board with hair dryers or heat shrink guns before any SMT work. We have some fancy heating doodad at work, cost hundreds, blows hot air on the bottom of the board just under the spot you're working on. No one uses it. For the bigger ICs, like PLCC, I use a hot air removal system. It's not terribly complex, just a box with control of air temperature and air flow rate, with a hose and custom nozzle. I have one at home, less than $300, Atten brand, got it off of Ebay. The custom nozzles are the killer part, money wise. You'll get a few free with the station, but nozzles quickly go from $75 to >$200. And the ones I got don't fit as well as the expensive Hakko models at work. I use the hot air station for all the SMT IC work, but only because I'm too lazy to swap out the tweezer tips.
Go ahead. As long as you stay with 1206 and 0805 components and SOIC ICs you should be able to handle all these handilly, with some practice. Even finer pitch ICs are possible, but you have to have a deft touch and lotsa flux.
Hope that helped.
kenjj