Ubuntu Touch installation guide

[VaZso]

I would say copying the data is one thing... even for it, dd is not a right tool, you may want to simply copy all files while preserving permissions.

The benefit of dd is that it will duplicate the disk partition layout.

I don't really know what are you mean about benefit. If you would like to create the same partition table, you can easily do it without dd.
Also, it is not necessary to keep the same size of partitions.

The drawback of using dd is to copy absolutely the same data so not only partition structure and data on them but every unnecessary bits which is generally not a good idea on something which has limited amount of write cycles (I am speaking about eMMC).