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I finally revisited this issue when building some nice visualizations. The guys' description above is spot-on. If you're using the PR2, just run this:

rosrun xacro xacro.py `rospack find pr2_description`/robots/pr2.urdf.xacro -o pr2_urdf.xml

Then in a launch file (that also plays your bag file with tf messages):

<launch>
  <param name="robot_description" command="cat $(find mypackage)/pr2_urdf.xml" />
  <node pkg="rosbag" type="play" name="rosbagplay"
    args="--clock -q -r 1.0 $(find mypackage)/tmp.bag" />
</launch>

Works great. Thanks for the feedback y'all.