> Consider filesystems, which are also tools used to manage stored data. If I'm writing some Python thing, I don't proclaim to everyone that I'm storing my work on a ReiserFS volume, and I'm thrilled by the fact that ReiserFS indexes its metadata using a B+ Tree. I just store my data.

No, but you do see thousands upon thousands of pages of text written about how to best use a shell to interface with the file system. This is what I think we are dealing with, we are on the cusp of actually having competent tools for the task of this collaborative, everybody works on their own computer but everything needs to be merged together in the end, and still work, thing that we have been doing for years. Give it a few years to settle down and either csh (Hg) or bash (Git) will win out and there will still be odd birds out there using sh (SVN) or zsh (Darcs) (feel free to permute those assignments to your taste).