You assume that there must be a distinction between the two when, in fact, there are a number of languages which forgo the "if-else" statement in favor of an "if-else" expression (in this case, they may not even have the ternary operator, which is no longer needed)
Imagine:
x = if (t) a else b
Anyway, the ternary operator is an expression in some languages (C,C#,C++,Java,etc) which do not have "if-else" expressions and thus it serves a distinct role there.
