I think my problem was one of timing;
If I first let the dofile do its thing as below AND then initiate the Ard sketch, things work just fine.
dofile("serial.lua")
uart.setup(0,9600,8,0,1) finished
waiting for serial data....
> cmd_2(78)
cmd_2(78) received
Anyway, the serial messaging set up by Stefan is working for me just as it was for him in my setup. I'll have to play with the timing to make sure that's taken care of in my case at least, ie I don't send stuff in before the ESP8266 is fine and ready. I think this was pointed out in Musti's post.
Anyway, happy tinkering, I'll be back when I extend this serial messaging communication module to serve my needs for sending measurements to my webserver at Grovestreams.com