Not saying that he copied BitKeeper 1:1, but if you look at BitKeeper usage examples (http://www.bitkeeper.org/), they do look familiar, don't they? BTW, BitKeeper is now open source - and development seems to have largely ceased...
> He aimed to create a tool that was:
> Distributed: [...]
> Compatible: The new tool would incorporate as many features and workflows as BitKeeper.
> Secure: [...]
and there is another quote from Linus Torvalds contained in the article:
> 'Well, it was obviously designed for our workflow, so that is part of it. I’ve already mentioned the whole “distributed” part many times, but it bears repeating. But it was also designed to be efficient enough for a biggish project like Linux, and it was designed to do things that people considered “hard” before git – because those are the things I do every day.'
10 days of writing code is impressive, but there would many,many days of thinking that preceded it.