There are features which make life a lot better when you have them: A local search to explore, a way to stash the working state to try something out etc. and on

There are features which make life a lot better when you have them: A local search to explore, a way to stash the working state to try something out etc. and once you got those you have mostly a distributed VCS. True the flexibility of multiple remotes and tracking branches most users probably don't need, but it's quite nice for various things, and be it only a simple backup way. On an aside: I always chuckle on the "distributed" VCS. Back in the days some people refered to CVS as a distributed VCS, comparing to RCS.