The main benefit is actually being able to have statically typed models instead of dynamic, to get autocompletion, error checks, etc.
In fact, I made a small utility library some time ago to create dynamic Pydantic models from SQLAlchemy models (https://github.com/tiangolo/pydantic-sqlalchemy), but that's only useful in a few cases, e.g. for response_model in FastAPI.
Or rather can I pass an existing pydantic class to SQLModel somehow?