I heavily caution against the feeling that "standard deviation is a simple way to essentially include percentiles." The usefulness of the standard deviation depends on the distributions that you are working with. Heavy tailed distributions appear a fair amount in practice, and the combo of summary statistics mentioned would not do well on those. Also, Madars' comment in this thread is a beautiful example of this: 4 completely different distributions, with identical mean and standard deviation (among other things). Histograms and percentiles, and if necessary their approximations, are more desirable for the above reasons.