However, they never seem to really take off. Why is that? One thought is also a mandatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/927/
It's also sometimes hard to know what exactly these extra commands will do if you don't use them often enough to know, so safe use still involves checking the docs, at which point you may as well google for "git [description of thing I need to do]"
That is - of course - if you are using git in more than just some basic way. If you're the single person committing code, it will "work" anyway. Perhaps that's the problem: Some people don't see that collaborating on the same set of files in more usable, but also more complex ways (than they are used to) requires more orchestration than just "lock - update - release"...