Is it a matter of current handling? Or repairability (easier to replace one external smoked cap than a whole IC...)?
(I know the filtering here is a little different in purpose, but it just made me wonder).
With on-die capacitance you can't realistically get enough capacitance for decoupling in the right frequency range (though it is still relevant: in practice decoupling is a case of multiple overlapping filters, from the response of the regulator itself, to any bulk capacitance, to local decoupling capacitors on the PCB, to the plane capacitance of the PCB itself, to the capacitance of the power distribution inside the IC. Each of these stages has a lower inductance but also a correspondingly lower capacitance and so deals with a higher-frequency part of the load).