I wonder how large that friction is. I look at git, mercurial, etc as distributed version control first and foremost, and that they're more alike than different

I wonder how large that friction is. I look at git, mercurial, etc as distributed version control first and foremost, and that they're more alike than different. It could be that I witnessed the popular adoption of all this via Linux going from tarballs/patches/mailing lists -> bitkeeper -> git, and have used and witnessed-the-evolution-of rcs, cvs, subversion, various DSCMs, and so my concepts of source control are stretched more broadly than people that are experiencing the dissonance between (e.g.) mercurial and git. Edit: clarifying words