There are definitely pitfalls of using cron for this kind of thing for production code. Particularly when the cycles are short.

You should consider what will happen if the task takes longer than the period you've set it to run from cron. If it's bad for overlapping runs (and it usually is, if for nothing else downward performance spirals when the system gets REALLY busy). Various locking schemes are possible to avoid the problems of overlapping runs, but most of them are trickier than it would seem at first and there are various race conditions to be considered.

But, you make good points about the simplicity of a crontab-based solution.