I highly recommend that anyone using Emacs and git gives Magit a try.
> This is necessary because Git on that platform comes with several wrapper scripts for the actual git binary, which are also placed on $PATH, and using one of these wrappers instead of the binary would degrade performance horribly.
That sounds like a good reason to be clever.
Things that are implemented as command line utilities or call such commandline utilities (which includes Visual Studio and Windows SDK!) tend to cause these cludges to become painfully apparent.