Lenses (as a construct) can encompass traversal, getting, setting, and transformation. With this in mind, I'd suggest that lenses are closer to a combination of XPath and XSLT. A key difference is that no schema is imposed.

That said, I'm a little sad to hear that lenses remind you of an XML technology. :) I suppose I'd rather that XSLT be perceived as a very particular way of doing data transformation under particular conditions with a particular syntax.

All of the above said, I think good lessons could (in theory) be learned from XML, but I feel like XML's notational particulars get over-accentuated and the underlying thinking about data structures gets muddled and even lost.