That is strictly true, but the beauty of a bitmap is that you can make it look better by rendering at a larger size and then scaling down. Effectively multisampling by hand. You can also do this as a preprocessing path in your asset pipeline and get better looking results than just using an SVG outright.
This is what we do for the cards at http://greenfelt.net. We lose a lot of detail in the face cards when we render them directly to the correct size as SVGs, especially at small sizes. There's a price to pay, of course, and it's a slightly more blurry look.
Another tangentially related but interesting fact is that every card set we have rendered as a pngcrushed png (except for the absolute largest size) is a smaller than the SVG source code.
It doesn't -- it's the same as a bitmap in the default resolution rendered. And it gets even better when you zoom-in on those 'low resolutions'.