"Mercurial is so much simpler than git" is only true for one reason: You prefer mercurial and dislike git, and so you look for flaws in git while glossing over flaws in mercurial.
Mercurial tracks changesets. Git guys are inventing all kings of weird entities. Local branch? Mutable branch? Do these kind of things have separate sets of semantics in the git world?
In mercurial, branch is just a constant name for a group of changesets. Bookmark is just a temporary pointer to the changeset. Head is a changeset (that have no successors). Phase is information about whether it is safe to modify changeset. Mercurial is indeed a lot simpler.
To quote my other comment:
* Branches (named and unnamed) are part of core mercurial.
* Bookmarks are part of core mercurial.
* Multiple heads are part of core mercurial.
* Phases are part of core mercurial.
* Secret changesets is part of core mercurial.
* mq is distributed with Mercurial.
* Local branches is an extension that isn't part of core mercurial, I'll give you that. However, calling it a "third-party extension" is pedantic. It's listed on the official mercurial web site, and using extensions is much more a part of every day usage of mercurial than using extensions in git, for example.
Local branch == Bookmark with unpushed changesets
All branches and commits/changesets are treated equal.
Yeah. In mercurial you have Branches and Bookmarks. In git you just have branches. Head is the current checked out commit/changeset. Git doesn't allow you to alter commits, only branches, so every modification in Git is inherently safe.
Mercurial has some neat features, but this idea that it's always easy to use and git is always hard to use simply isn't true.
And as anton_gogolev mentioned, ChangesetEvolution[1] will probably help augment HistEdit and Rebase for a number of operations. It will allow pushable history rewriting.
You answered that in your first paragraph: for many years, the first time people looked at Mercurial the answer for that class of problems was mq. The problem now is that it's still easy to find stale internal documentation, old blog posts, etc. which haven't been updated with the new recommendations. I thought that it might be worth having a small campaign to encourage people to update old wikis, contact blog authors, etc. when they find those recommendations and suggest a simple “this is no longer recommended – see …” update.
[1]: https://air.mozilla.org/changesets-evolution-with-mercurial/
I think git branches correspond more to hg bookmarks, than to hg named branches.
Local branches in Hg is the same as bookmarks you havent pushed.
Remote tracking branches in Hg would be bookmarks you have pushed.
Mercurial itself has just heads, which can be named or not. Bookmarks are orthogonal to the whole thing.
Anyway, you are plain wrong.
* Branches (named and unnamed) are part of core mercurial.
* Bookmarks are part of core mercurial.
* Multiple heads are part of core mercurial.
* Phases are part of core mercurial.
* Secret changesets is part of core mercurial.
* mq is distributed with Mercurial.
* Local branches is an extension that isn't part of core mercurial, I'll give you that. However, calling it a "third-party extension" is pedantic. It's listed on the official mercurial web site, and using extensions is much more a part of every day usage of mercurial than using extensions in git, for example.
edit: formatting.