[srrr]

On my system spatialite is 10% the speed with the Germany extract compared to PostgreSQL. Bigger extracts don't work properly.

But loading data directly from a osm.pbf or loading data via the QGis QuickOSM plugin into a spatialite file gives two problems:

1) You can not transform the data to fit your personal usage. Raw osm data is not nice to work with.

2) I had many problems with areas stored as relations (example: islands in lakes) and relation handling overall is a mess.

For the first steps and to toy around osm data in spatialite works. But don't fear osm2pgsql. For standard use cases it's a oneliner.