after wondering around some time, i just realized something (maybe obvious, not very much for me). Hope helps someone to not waste time as i did :-P
when you have something like:
<?php
$xmlstr = <<<XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<double xmlns="http://foosite.foo/">2328</double>
XML;
?>
you will have the simpleXML object "transformed" to the text() content:
<?php
$xml = simplexml_load_string($xmlstr);
echo $xml; // this will echo 2328 (string)
?>