XML is only trivially "readable without any software at all". The same is true of any binary format - the issue is that it can be read, but not easily processed - which is also the case for XML (you need to integrate an XML parser for that).
And if you are including XML libs, why not SQlite libs?
More to the point, no one needs to install a full blown database engine to read a plain text document.
You may argue that specialized tools make the job easier, but you also need to acknowledge that requiring specialized tools just to open a text file is silly.
A printout of a binary dump does not provide any clues as to how the data was structured.
> a binary dump does not provide any clues as to how the data was structured
True, but if that binary format is SQlite, the structure is fully documented. You could work it out mentally just as you could work out any given XML schema.