In this case git can do the same thing, but notice you can only do it because git provides a special command for getting that revision. Recasts are really general (a greatest common ancestor function is provided, but can be easily synthesised from more primitive building blocks) and can be used everywhere, so you can bisect over changes you made that touched files matching a pattern, or whatever. They aren't something I use every day, but they are really useful on occasions and allow for some pretty robust tooling to be written.

This requires using bash. I find it kind of cheating that git ships bash on Windows so that Windows users can rely on bash for composing git commands. I'm not sure if Windows users are generally that happy about typing bash commands, but I guess nobody really cares what you have to type in as long as it's high in the Google hits for whatever operation you want to perform.

Mercurial's API (i.e. the CLI) makes a point of being usable with powershell and cmd.exe, which I think some Windows users appreciate.

Beauty of revsets is their ubiquity.

Diff would be `hg diff -r 'ancestor(default, experiment)' -r experiment`

Want to list commits in experiment? Just change diff to log. Generate patch file with all commits? Change it to export.