I'm designing a small controller application that needs a modest amount
of EEPROM storage to be attached to a 16C73 PIC, and I'm looking for
suggestions on choosing the I2C or 3/4 wire (SPI?) interface versions
- those would be the 24LC01 or 93LC46 parts.  There appears to be no
difference in cost or availability, and the performance differences that
do exist seem to be completely immaterial for this application (ie, I
donnn't care how fast they transfer data, etc).  So I seem to be able to
choose which device I use on the basis of conveninence of the driver code
I'll need, and this is where I have a few questions.

I2C first: it seems pretty clear that the SSP doesn't do anything at all
for master-mode operation of an I2C interface, so I may as well ignore it
and just wiggle the interface pins via the PORTx and TRISx registers.  Yes?

For the 3/4 wire interface I'm not so sure - does that protocol
correspond to the SPI mode of the PIC's synchronous port?  If so, is it
more than a family resemblance - does the SPI mode actually handle the
protocol used with the EEPROM?  It looks to me like it doesn't: the SPI
mode seems to be strictly byte oriented, while the EEPROM seems to need a
varying number of bits for its commands (the data itself is in byte-size
bits, but the command and perhaps address aren't, if I'm reading things
correctly).

The sample code in the app notes is for a 16C5x without any hardware
assistance, and this would almost certainly be usable, but with an eye
towards potential future applications I'd like to know if there are
better solutions possible for the PICs with the SSP module hardware
available.

Thanks!