Git wasn't the only DVCS with an elegant model. Mercurial, Darcs and Fossil came out around the same time. All are equally elegant in their own ways, and all ha

Git wasn't the only DVCS with an elegant model. Mercurial, Darcs and Fossil came out around the same time. All are equally elegant in their own ways, and all have a much friendlier UI than Git. So it is possible to have both an elegant implementation, and a friendly UI that doesn't force the user to understand the internals to work with the tool. Git's elegant model is not why it won out. Despite of its shortcomings, I suspect the cult of personality around Linus had a big role in that, as well as major services like GitHub.