Well there are a lot of other approaches.
MVC is just popular because it suits most situations (or better said can be used in most situations) and has established itself as a de-facto standard.
What can be said is that every programming/design pattern - or more specific architectural - depends on some classification.
Those are often (of course they can be devided further):
User Interface (pretty images, forms etc)
Application (your application logic and stuff that needs to be secured from the client - ak lot of that can often be done in the user inteface, eg. by javascript)
Database - self explaining
Infrastructure (very basic stuff like hard disk, server systems, network etc.)
Of course there is always the naive, procedural straight-forward approach but also a lot fo other patterns that can link and structure the access and controlling to these basic layers.
Mvc is one of them. But here are some example of others:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_View_ViewModel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_View_Presenter
Is MVC-ARS preferable to classic MVC to prevent overloading?
And here a lot more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_pattern_(computer_science)
