I have no opinion on the merits of Git-style branches vs. Mercurial-style branches (mostly because I haven't really used the latter, either), but Mercurial has

I have no opinion on the merits of Git-style branches vs. Mercurial-style branches (mostly because I haven't really used the latter, either), but Mercurial has supported Git-style branching (termed "bookmarks") for quite some time now, too. Other than that, I like not having to deal with the additional complication of Git's staging area in Mercurial (anything I personally did with the staging area I can replicate much better with Mercurial interactive commit feature), plus Mercurial's evolve extension, which turns commit amending, rebasing and all other kinds of history editing into non-destructive operations.