Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your question is difficult to answer in the light in which you intended it, because it doesn't really apply to me. I am not so invested in my source control system to say it "rocks". It works for my purposes and maps nicely to my view of how to handle source code--it's less that Mercurial is awesome, it's that I find Git unpleasant to work with. I find Git over-engineered toward the wrong goals; while I don't doubt t…
I don't think user-friendliness should be a primary goal for a version control system. The reason being that this is something we use day in and day out for years, so the importance of the learning curve is dwarfed by the power of the UI and the workflows it enables. When I switched from svn to git (and don't take this to mean I'm comparing svn to hg, because obviously hg is in git's league, not svn's), the learning…
I don't think git's internal logic is more meaningfully flexible than hg's, but, IMO, hg provides a vastly more user-friendly experience. I could be wrong on this, but assuming I'm not--if you can get both, why not get both? =)
(And don't get me wrong--I realize the arguments for rebase as opposed to merge. I reject them for my own projects for reasons that are largely subjective, and prefer a system where they are difficult and not commonplace. It's totally a matter of taste, but one I do feel somewhat strongly about and is what I'm referring to by disagreements in philosophy.)