That's true, but it does have some advantages.

Firstly, your friends are more likely to notice it's a scam because they're still connected to your legitimate account. Second, if this does happen to you and you've deleted your account, you can't report it to Facebook. Reporting this issue to Facebook requires either:

1) You (the victim) report the cloned account from the legit account. Or; 2) One of your friends reports it but they must select the victim from their list of friends.

Can't do either if your account is deleted.

That being said, I followed their process for several clients and Facebook refused to do anything about it.

I believe you should be able to report the impersonator although I don't know whether or not it actually works.

You can only report it if the legit account still exists.