Sure, it's basically just down to those problems with email deliverability. As you correctly point out, SMS isn't a perfectly secure solution either; however, I almost always receive an SMS for authentication within a few seconds to a minute, and only in a few cases have never received the message at all.
If text messages were abused to the degree that email is, and all kinds of different things were developed to try to "solve" that abuse (as has happened with email), then deliverability would suffer and it would be a coin toss for which approach to use.
