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I think it blocks on write for 'the smallest possible time' (its does as much of the data change preparation as possible before locking the database).

If you are just using it as a single user for generating excel style reports then this doesn't really matter.

I have been thinking for a while that if I had to export a significant amount of data from an app for a tech savvy audience, I would probably send it out in an Sqlite DB instead of XML.

Yes, but it's a little more involved: http://www.sqlite.org/lockingv3.html

By default it does deferred transactions (exclusive lock is only acquired when you need to commit), but if you use insert/update/delete outside a transaction, each statement is it's own transaction.

Locking is database-wide, although IIRC there's some branch that can do table-level locking.

As far as I know, SQLite's version of "table-level locking" is to put each table in a different database file and ATTACH them all to one database connection.