As Castaway pointed out, there is a COPY function incorporated within the SQL that SQLite understands. That should also be considerably faster, and if I were planning on converting a text file again, especially one of greater size than what I dealt with last time, I'd use that.

The biggest problem with COPY (that I see) is that in order to get the autoincrementing first column, you have to preprocess the flat file by prepending a \N character to the beginning of each record. Of course that can be accomplished by a one-liner, but it would be nice if the COPY feature of SQLite's SQL provided for automatic padding and such.