I felt all of the examples read extremely easily, but I'm a frequent Haskell user. I think that's the primary audience.
Author here. You're right, "Awk in Haskell" is perhaps a bit misleading. The intention is not to replace Awk for the masses, but mainly to provide an Awk-like tool for programers who are more familiar with Haskell. Similar to pyline: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/437932-pyline-a-grep-lik....
I thought it was going to be an implementation of AWK written in Haskell, but it's actually an AWK-like text-processing tool that uses Haskell as the language.
Not sure whether that's better or worse than traditional AWK. Haskell's certainly a well-respected language, but I found the examples in the README kind of confusing. I don't know much about Haskell in detail, so maybe that's just me, but it does suggest that this lacks some of AWK's readability for the uninitiated....