You absolutely can receive texts from other Twilio numbers. It's shortcodes you can't receive from (which is definitely a problem).
Your data would be cheaper if you set the billing mode to "individual" (and not "pooled"), which will charge you for blocks of 1GB at a time. Having said that, data will still probably not be cheaper than a normal retail cell plan.
Aside from that, another issue is lack of MMS support. Twilio Wireless is designed for IoT use cases, so general cell phone use isn't something it's optimized for.
(Source/Disclosure: I'm the engineer who built the first version of Twilio Wireless.)
MMS is useless anyway so I see that as a non-issue, if anything it removes useless complexity. Social networks, email and WhatsApp/Telegram replaced MMS long ago, and as a bonus they don’t re-compress your images to make them look even more awful.
You absolutely can receive texts from other Twilio numbers. It's shortcodes you can't receive from (which is definitely a problem).
Your data would be cheaper if you set the billing mode to "individual" (and not "pooled"), which will charge you for blocks of 1GB at a time. Having said that, data will still probably not be cheaper than a normal retail cell plan.
Aside from that, another issue is lack of MMS support. Twilio Wireless is designed for IoT use cases, so general cell phone use isn't something it's optimized for.
(Source/Disclosure: I'm the engineer who built the first version of Twilio Wireless.)