I just ran into this attempting to query a 4.1 ESXi server here.  I don't know if the fact that it's ESXi affects this or not, but I manually downloaded the vim.wsdl using wget and verified that it is in fact missing any trace of RetrieveProperties* methods:

grep RetrieveP vim.wsdl
         <element name="RetrieveProductComponents"  type="vim25:RetrieveProductComponentsRequestType" />
         <element name="RetrieveProductComponentsResponse">
   <message name="RetrieveProductComponentsRequestMsg">
      <part name="parameters" element="vim25:RetrieveProductComponents" />
   <message name="RetrieveProductComponentsResponseMsg">
      <part name="parameters" element="vim25:RetrieveProductComponentsResponse" />
      <operation name="RetrieveProductComponents">
         <input message="vim25:RetrieveProductComponentsRequestMsg" />
         <output message="vim25:RetrieveProductComponentsResponseMsg" />
      <operation name="RetrieveProductComponents">

Any ideas?

Tom