You definitely don't need to offer SSH access, but only someone with SSH access can create new repositories. I have it set up for my clients where they request a setup from me, then I send them their login info. I use the native daemon provided by SVN, so no need to hook it up to apache via DAV (which is complicated and might lead to instability, plus I just never needed to bother with it, since it works just fine this way for me).