Roni's description is very good, but I will add to it with a little history.
Certainly it is much easier with today's modeling programs to automesh tets than it is to gain an equivalent mesh of bricks.
There are two things which drove bricks meshing in the past: 1) as Roni pointed out, fewer DOF gives equivalent answers; and 2) the programs which automesh tets were not as robust in the past as they are today.
The incredible advances in computing power over the last decade have largely made item 1 a moot point--many of the more powerful PC's are able to do the same work that only recently required a supercomputer. As such, what was once a 10,000 dof brick model can be made into a 100,000 dof 2nd order tet model, and still be run on a pc or a desktop workstation.
Along with this advance, many preprocessors have made huge strides in tet automeshing, which has now made it equivalently much more efficient (from a human modeling standpoint) to model tets (vs. modeling bricks) than it once was.
Depending on the type of analysis one is doing, there are still benefits to modeling bricks sometimes, instead of tets. However, for general purpose (especially linear, small-displacement), if your computer can handle the dof's, it is generally much less headache and man-time to model tets.
Historically, this wasn't always the case, hence the tradition of bricks.