What is the argument against having a staging area? The Git staging area is crucial in my mind.
It's simply not necessary to have that feature. Sapling encourages regularly committing and amending commits rather than staging changes. It's also easy to commit / amend part of your work by selecting the lines to include in nice curses interface (--interactive).
I still commit small, frequent. But i like `git add -p` to skip debug lines, hardcoded conditions, etc. I don't want to mistakenly auto commit a whole pile of lines and then have to remove debugs/hacks/etc from things i've committed.
Stage + Unstaged is my working area, and the two live together quite nicely to me personally. I could live without it, definitely.. but i'm not sure i'd want to.