The various command-line and text-friendly bulk/bcp tools are the pain-point here.
SSIS is insanely powerful and performant, but it's also insanely cumbersome and script-unfriendly. Microsoft has finally started embracing the power of plain text and scriptable tools in their web-stack and .NET, but SSIS represents a holdover from their heavyweight GUI-and-wizard days.
Fair enough. I don't use those tools too often, so I tend to forget they're around as well.
That said, if you are doing repeatable jobs (and not just one-off imports) you can still create a SSIS package, and then run the package from your script using the package-runner and appropriate config-data.
SSIS is insanely powerful and performant, but it's also insanely cumbersome and script-unfriendly. Microsoft has finally started embracing the power of plain text and scriptable tools in their web-stack and .NET, but SSIS represents a holdover from their heavyweight GUI-and-wizard days.