This generally sums up why I prefer Mercurial. It provides all the benefits of a distributed VCS, but with less of the complexity, at the expense of some (usually unneeded, at least for me) flexibility.
I find mercurial is a little easier but a mouse could starve on the difference.
That having been said, while I wish git were easier, I can cope with it. I can't cope with both git and mercurial. I haven't got the brain capacity to remember how to use both of them without them blurring together. I want to standardize on one or the other. And once I ask which to standardize on, git wins by simple market share. That's why I ended up choosing it over mercurial.
Given that "everyone" knows git, and essentially no one uses hg, I think saying it involves "less complexity" is very much missing the forest for the trees.
I see by your quotes that you are probably aware of this, but I think the set of developers that knows how to use git is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the one that doesn't.
Probably true. But at least in the open source community, it's pulled even with CVS and svn and is at least an order of magnitude higher than that of hg (or any of the other also-rans). Obviously "someone" important is going to use any product (see the irate comments for some great examples).
And there are very high costs to heterogeneity in this world. Using a weird SCM means that every new contributor needs to learn a new tool and new workflow, and that hurts. Using the one that "everyone" knows is a big advantage to projects.
And git is good. Not "the best" perhaps; and undeniably ugly in places. But it's more than good enough. And the existence of a community like github make it, frankly, better for new users than other options.
