) professional opinion.

You can do a lot with group policy and not just for software distribution, software restriction policies for application control etc.
I think a lot of people underestimate Group Policy.
Again using software restriction as an example, properly setup it can provide a very good applications control system, at least restricting any non authorised software etc.
Where I am now had some cowboy contractors in (who got paid a damn site more than I did
) when they were basically starting the whole ICT infrastructure again from scratch, new domain, hardware, the lot, who really had no clue and I've spent a few months turning their crap into a good well run system 
As i understand it, reporting is pretty sparse on GPO, hence the popularity of SMS.