All I can say is thank goodness I can use Git with Subversion without anyone being the wiser. Local feature branches are one of the godsends of DVCS.
We use Savana to add proper branches to Subversion. Tool lacks polishing, but it is helpful. It is simple to use: you can create private branch, sync your private branch with parent branch, and promote your private branch to parent branch ( http://savana.codehaus.org/gettingstarted.html ). It is not a git replacement, of course.