Indeed, Mercurial does do this very nicely. Even if the local revision number isn't entirely trustworthy (i.e. can't be compared between different repo clones)

Indeed, Mercurial does do this very nicely. Even if the local revision number isn't entirely trustworthy (i.e. can't be compared between different repo clones) it sure is nice to have a decent idea how old a revision is... "revision 1000, oh that's ancient; revision 50000, oh that is very new".