It can also do 240 lines (technically 239?) instead, similar to the NES, though on NTSC this dramatically reduces your vblank DMA bandwidth. It also makes some of the larger sprite sizes more difficult to hide "offscreen".
So, very little reason to use it on NTSC in the past, since there's no expectation the end user would even see the blank area. On PAL it wouldn't be much of a compromise at all, assuming your game was exclusive to PAL, but even among PAL-only games I'm having a real hard time finding any examples!
List:
- Rendering Ranger (NTSC, does some manual blanking)
- Super Mario World (PAL second revision)
- Super Mario All Stars (PAL)
- Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss (NTSC, Japan)
- Super Tetris 3 (NTSC, Japan)
- Super Mario Kart (PAL)
- Tetris & Dr. Mario (NTSC and PAL releases)
- Tom & Jerry (NTSC and PAL)
- Yoshi's Cookie (NTSC and PAL)