Setting up a Text Distribution List

unfortunately it cannot be done yet... please provide feedback at apple.com/feedback

Once you set up a group text message by manually adding all the addressees, you can send another message to that same group by tapping an entry in the Messages list, then type a new message in the conversation and tap Send. You can clear messages from the conversation, but do not delete the conversation entirely. See this: http://www.apple.com/iphone/how-to/#messages.sending-and-receiving-messages

To make it easier to find the conversation for subsequent messages, create a new contact using the company field and name it "My Team" with your own phone number. Use that contact as the first contact in your group SMS conversation.

Yes.

Remember that the iPhone keeps all text conversations to the same person/group together so all you do is create a new message, and add each of the recipients in the 'To' field once, and then send a message.

The next time you want to use the same distro list, open up the old message in your list of text recipients, and send another text.

There is no distribution list as such, but the recipients of a conversation can have multiple texts sent to the same list as long as you don't delete the original text and subsequent ones.

I hope that makes sense - it really does work.