Cgroups are a lot more than just "namespaces". It is also the mechanism by which you can constrain how much CPU, Memory, Network Bandwidth, Storage IOPS or Throughput, etc., processes in a particular cgroup or container can use.
But I think the core point here is that, as with much of the Plan 9 design, by including a more elegant and powerful abstraction in the core design, the need for a much more powerful and much more complicated abstraction layer on was obviated, if not eliminated.