Fair question. Two reasons (at least):

1. Git is much, much faster than Subversion. A real-life example: merging two branches with about 2,000 commits worth of changes (~250K lines added, changed or deleted) took over 6 hours with svn but <15 minutes with git. It's not just network overhead, our network is plenty fast.

2. Though you push to a remote master, that doesn't mean you can't branch locally. You can and you should; it makes it easy to work on multiple features simultaneously.

Then there are things like `git stash` and `git archive` that make life just that much better.