From my understanding, the German Schwerpunkt was a tactic where they focused firepower on one point to break the enemy, and then break through. But was this more useful than a pincer maneuver, where they would envelope the enemy forces and attack from multiple directions?
Forgive me if I come off as condescending, but I think you're misunderstanding the concept. It's not a tactic so much as a method of concentrating forces to achieve a decisive breakthrough. There is no limitation to have only one schwerpunkt on an entire front; rather, the schwerpunkt for a given unit is simply where that unit concentrates its force to achieve a breakthrough, whether that is a corps, an army, or whatnot. You may be getting confused because in the Battle of France, the Germans hurled almost all their mechanized strength at one schwerpunkt (the Ardennes-Sedan axis), but that represents an extreme and atypical example, and requires ignoring the contribution of Army Group A, sweeping down through Holland, as well as the unique geography involved. There was nothing preventing German units from encircling enemies once they were through their front lines; indeed, that was the whole point of German operational art in WW2. It was focused on the kesselschlacht - that is, the cauldron battle - in which the enemy is encircled and destroyed close to the front lines, rather than being allowed to retreat into the interior.
Notice the black arrows? Where each one of those crosses the Soviet frontier, that is a schwerpunkt; six by my count. Notice how they branch out and converge once they are past the front? That is them maneuvering to encircle the enemy. See the orange spots? Each of those represents a major encirclement of Soviet forces. The Kiev encirclement alone represents somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 Soviet soldiers bottled up and destroyed. The Germans were very, very good at this type of warfare.
While the Germans traced their mobile warfare doctrine back to Frederick the Great, it shouldn't surprise you to learn that there were major changes in warfare between 1740 and 1940, and that the Germans adapted to these changes. For our purposes, the most important change in warfare at the time was the continuous front; in WWI, both sides deployed so many men that the lines stretched until they reached insurmountable obstacles; the North Sea and the Swiss Alps. In this context, any attack would be a frontal attack, because there's no not-front that can be attacked.
The idea behind the attack of concentrated mobile firepower (Schwerpunkt is a very loosely defined term tracing at least back to Clausewitz, who used it in several ways that often contradicted each other) is that envelopment maneuvers only become possible after the continuous front is broken. Once you break through the enemy line, it becomes two lines, with an insecure north or south flank; from there you can roll up either of them in concert with forces attacking them from the front, then turn towards their remaining forces and destroy them in concentric operations.
During the Battle of France, you saw this combination of frontal assault and flanking maneuver lead to the greatest encirclement battle of all time. The Dutch, Belgians, British, and French occupied a continuous line, stretching from the North Sea, the Dutch-Belgian plains, the Ardennes, and through Alsace-Lorraine to the Swiss Alps. The Germans had three Army Groups; B in the north, A in the center, and C in the south, responsible for Holland and Flanders, the Ardennes, and the Maginot Line respectively. Without a navy, the Germans had no way to launch a pincer attack against this line.
Instead, the Germans attacked with Army Group B first, drawing the Allies' best formations into a ferocious armor battle on the Belgian plains. Meanwhile, Army Group C launched pinning attacks against French forces stationed in the Maginot fortifications. This meant that when Army Group A attacked the key crossing over the Meuse river at Sedan, there weren't enough reserves to plug the gap once the German infantry fought their way through the first line of fortifications. This divided the Allies into two separate lines; the northern one saw it's southern flank threatened, wheeled its right wing formations to face south, while the southern line wheeled its left to face north. This widened the gap, and allowed the Germans to race for the English channel winning the 1940 Tour de France and cut the two wings off from each other. They then destroyed in concentric attacks formations numbering 1.2 million soldiers who had been cut off from their overland supply lines, and these formations had been the best in the Allied armies, with all their mechanized equipment.
The French then deployed their last reserves in a defensive line north of Paris, but the Germans ground their way through and swept through the French interior, encircling the French forces manning the Maginot Line, and by the time an armistice was signed, they had occupied most of the country.
TL;DR the schwerpunkt attack isn't an alternative to a pincer movement in modern warfare, but a necessary precondition.
