Cheap local branching: mercurial has had this since day one, and for a long time has had most of the capabilities mentioned in this section for a while. Unfortunately, it hasn't had good named branching support, so most mercurial users preferred to branch through cloning, but that was never necessary. Right now you can use bookmarks for temporary named branches but there's no built-in support for sharing them. You have to write your own extensions to copy bookmarks files around automatically or just do it manually. Mercurial really needs to deal with this, I think. It's the only feature I've seen in git that I wish mercurial had.

Staging area: mercurial has mq, which is far more powerful than a staging area. In all honesty, I only use mq as a staging area and ignore it's other features most of the time, and using mq only as a staging area is just as easy as using git's staging area. Also, not having a staging area forced on the user by default makes mercurial much easier to pick up than git initially, and later on if a user wants the same functionality he or she can get it.

github: Mercurial has bitbucket. Github is far more popular, but not necessarily technically superior as far as I know.

That puts mercurial almost entirely on par with git in terms of this web site's criteria.

edit: reading more carefully, http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/ doesn't actually claim mercurial doesn't have the features mentioned above. It does just claim that git does things better. They say their local branching is better(it is) and github's social atmosphere is better than competing products(it is). However, with mq and the record extension you can do the same things as with the staging area.

Another great resource is the official Git User Manual, which I didn't know existed until just the other day: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual....

I am brand new to git and I've been pleasantly surprised at both how thorough and also how newbie-friendly the User Manual is.