Thanks for your comment, its the other schemes beyond a centralised workflow that I have not arrived at yet, as I'm new to Git and not finding it friendly so far (despite years of experience with other systems), I probably just don't get it yet ;-)
Some of the first things you'll want to look at: doing many small commits, using many lightweight branches, and using commit --amend or rebase -i on local changes to fiddle with them before pushing them. Think of each branch as the result of your work, despite it containing many commits; you can edit the branch as a whole until you get it right, and then push it, much like you'd edit the SVN working copy until ready to run "svn commit". You get to have more structure in your working copy, and keep that structure when you push to the public repository.
One big recommendation, though: learning Git works a lot like learning the UNIX command line. You can learn a pile of individual tools, but it also helps to know the philosophy of how they fit together, so you can more easily string together impressive ad-hoc solutions when you need to. I'd suggest reading more about Git's repository structure, and thinking about it more as a DAG, and how the commands fit in that model.
You say you don't get it yet and I think it's the issue. Coming from years of SVN I was in more or less the same situation (but I choosed to switch so it was obviously less painful). Then I started playing with local branches and funny stuff like that. I can assure you that once you get yet you'll never wan't to go back :)