I went a similar route although I have both a micro controller and a host SPI interface. I just used the header interface that totalphase.com uses for their beagle and aardvark SPI/I2C monitor/host adapters. This way I can use the aardvark tool to test out the SPI (and I2C that I use for other functions) functionality on the board without writing any code (they have a pretty nice cross-platform application for this) and then as I bring up the micro-controller I can monitor what actually happens on the bus.

So far it's working well, although I'm currently testing out the power supplies, getting the A1's going will be soon!