> rebasing in Mercurial simply means chopping...

Sure, but since commits have a branch attribute attached to them, "rebasing" does not appear to be "first class". It is something that has to be bolted on with an extension.

> because mercurial couldn't care less if the sub-tree you are rebasing belongs to a branch or not

IIUC Git also does not care much about the rebase target being a "branch".

I agree that Mercurial provides more value out of the box than git because it preserves branch info in commits.

I can live with Git because Git is "enough" if used carefully and after coming to terms with the non-intutive UI.