Care to explain how Linus got it wrong? I've never used Monotone, but searching the web I could't find a single thing in which Monotone was better than Git (although I did find information of the opposite kind).
More fundamentally, monotone records both manifest and diff history, which from the git point of view is entirely redundant. However it allows monotone to do much more sophisticated merge handling than out-of-the-box git, and better captures the human intent of a changeset. It allows monotone to correctly handle copy operations, for example, which is relevant in the context of history-rewriting operations.