Most systems software gets by fine with a combination of thread-safe and thread-local RC. Reference counting is a form of garbage collection that works really well when it's used only for the subset of data that needs GC--which is the style that Rust encourages anyhow.
For Servo we need a javascript engine. We're already using Spidermonkey. It has a GC for Javascript; we're already paying those costs. The Rust-side representation of DOM objects is also managed by the GC; that makes sense because these are tied to Javascript things.
We don't use the GC elsewhere. I think at some point we did, but the only place now in Servo where GC is used is where the data is strongly connected to data already managed by the SM GC.
Nim's GC is for general-purpose use in a language. Spidermonkey's GC is for GCing javascript, which already has an extensive runtime (which the GC ties into heavily). "Nim's GC is better than Spidermonkey's" is a statement of no value (and oversimplifies the situation) unless the context is specified. Using the SM GC to collect random Rust objects would be a bad idea. Somehow rigging up spidermonkey to use a Nim-like GC in Rust (all other things being the same) would also be a bad idea. Two different scenarios, two different GCs.
At the same time, we're putting a lot of thought into how to properly add an optional tracing GC. It's important that it doesn't impact the no-GC case, which is still, of course, primary.
The current reference counted types don't just get used for convenience, they get used because they describe the actual life cycle of the data they contain. A tracing GC would be similar.
Gc is "just" an automatic memory management. Rust is not a garbage collected language, but it does have optional garbage collection available.