I wasn't able to find a really easy way to determine if the service running on port 5001 was the ipfs daemon. It might be beneficial to have the API respond to a request to HEAD requests with something to identify itself.

curl -I http://127.0.0.1:5001/ipfs/
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 06:06:42 GMT
Content-Length: 38
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Server: Ipfs-Daemon/0.1.7