It's technically correct. The key thing here is that it's isomorphic. You can either have a system of commits in which diffs are computed between commits or a s

It's technically correct. The key thing here is that it's isomorphic. You can either have a system of commits in which diffs are computed between commits or a system of diffs in which commits are computed by applying diffs. The trade-offs are in performance of various operations, not in the user exposed semantics. Git chooses to have its first class object be commits and diffs are computed on the fly. So again it's technically correct, but in practice commands like cherry-pick, which treats a commit like a diff between that commit and its parent really blur the line. I think in reality you can be a really advanced git user and not even realize that there's a difference between a commit based and diff base version control system, because in practice there really isn't much of a difference.