[modeless]

Yes, and there are many other tessellations you can use, if you texture it with a single texture. But you can't texture a whole planet with one texture if you allow zooming from planet to human scale, the texture would be terabytes. You must tile the sphere with textures that are loaded on demand, and textures are square, so it makes sense to divide the sphere into quads (actually a quadtree for zooming).