You can also freely branch and merge between your own private branches, without making everybody else see these numerous branches polluting the file hierarchy o

You can also freely branch and merge between your own private branches, without making everybody else see these numerous branches polluting the file hierarchy of the central repo. More generally, I never liked how to cvs and subversion a branch is basically just a copy at the file level. That mixes version control metadata among the file paths that are themselves being version controlled.