> But the reason git beat out the competition isn't git's excellent UI or large marketing budget, it's that those features actually provide significant value.

I don't know if it's true for everyone, but this is at least true for me. The reason I started to work on a git remote helper to talk to mercurial servers is that I grew frustrated that mercurial didn't have some of those features (and that the existing git remote helpers were not working well at the scale of mozilla-central, or required a local mercurial clone under the hood)