The drawback to this mode is it looks like ass on anything but a composite display -- which not a lot of people actually hooked up their CGAs to.
There was also a hack to set the display to text mode and reprogram the character height to fit 100 characters vertically on the screen, then use chopped-off block graphics characters to yield, in effect, a 160x100, 16-color, any color any monitor (composite or RGB) pseudo-graphics mode that compared favorably to, say, the 128x48 mono pseudo-graphics mode of the TRS-80. More PC games made use of this mode; one of the more notable recent ones is Paku Paku, a (remarkably good) Pac-Man clone.
Yes, all tradeoffs. Of course, it was not too difficult to have multiple sets of art.
I like 160x100 presentations and thought they were a good use of the CGA personally. A lot of game can be done at that resolution.
Really, the thing for IBM to have done was 16 color graphics of some kind. 160x200 was the obvious choice in that it would have worked with their memory scan scheme.
There was also a hack to set the display to text mode and reprogram the character height to fit 100 characters vertically on the screen, then use chopped-off block graphics characters to yield, in effect, a 160x100, 16-color, any color any monitor (composite or RGB) pseudo-graphics mode that compared favorably to, say, the 128x48 mono pseudo-graphics mode of the TRS-80. More PC games made use of this mode; one of the more notable recent ones is Paku Paku, a (remarkably good) Pac-Man clone.