We seem to be in full agreement. I only wanted to spell out my own reasoning for using curl and not wget, since you explicitly said you were interested in this information, and I suppose there are others that think like me in this regard as well :)

One popular UNIX-like OS that comes with curl and not wget is OS X. That might also drive adoption.

(I seem to remember having had to install both curl and wget on Ubuntu, but I am unable to verify this now)