> ... but as a universal transport it is pretty rad

I think that's the key point that everybody misses. XML was really just intended to solve the data interoperability and transport problems, not to function as a datastore. It just so happens that once you've made some XML, or received some from somebody, you may as well just deal with it as is rather than XSLT it into your local apps proprietary format (and as it also turns out, it's fairly easy for people to write by hand and debug in simple cases).