I use awk in exactly this way personally, but, awk is not as commonly readable as grep and sed (in fact, that use of grep and sed should be pretty comprehensible to someone who just knows regular expressions from some programming languages and very briefly glances at the manpages, whereas it would be difficult to learn what that awk syntax means just from e.g. the GNU awk manpage). So, just as you could write a Perl one-liner but you shouldn't if you want other people to read the code, I'd probably advise against the awk one-liner too.
Not sure why you say grep and sed are more readable than awk! (not sure what 'commonly readable' means). Or that even that particular line in awk is harder to understand than the grep and sed man pages. The awk manpage even has examples, including print $2. The sed manpages must be the most impenetrable manpages known to 'man', if you don't already understand sed. (People might already know s///g because 99% of the time, that's all sed is used for.)
