Rendering is usually the slowest process in the game loop. Humans don't easily notice a difference in a frame rate faster than 60, so it often less important to waste time on rendering faster than that. However, there are other processes that would benefit more from a faster rate. Physics is one. Too big of a change in one loop can cause objects to glitch right past walls. There may be ways to get around simple collision errors on larger increments, but for lots of complex physics interactions, you just aren't going to get the same accuracy. If the physics loop is run more frequently though, there is less of a chance of glitching past a wallglitches, since objects can be moved in smaller increments without being rendered every time. More resources go toward the sensitive physics engine and less are wasted on drawing more frames the user can't see.
This is especially important in more graphics-intensive games. If there was one render for every game loop, and a player did not have the most powerful machine, there may be points in the game where the fps drops to 30 or 40. While this would still be a not entirely horrible frame rate, the game would start to get fairly slow if we tried keeping each physics change reasonably small to avoid glitching. The player would be annoyed that his character walks only half the normal speed. If the rendering rate was independent from the rest of the loop, however, the player would be able to stay at a fixed walk speed despite the drop in frame rate.