It's interesting how the theoretical model of Haskell--"all functions in Haskell take just single arguments"--differs from implementation, where, for functions of known arity, GHC in particular does not actually "follow the currying story literally" [2].
[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Rts/Hask...
[2] http://community.haskell.org/~simonmar/papers/eval-apply.pdf
You're absolutely right to point out that implementations and theory often differ; compilers often do tricky things behind the scences.