I'm not sure about git vs hg, but I'd definitely say that the speed of git is a win vs svn. For example, running status to see the state of the working directo

I'm not sure about git vs hg, but I'd definitely say that the speed of git is a win vs svn. For example, running status to see the state of the working directory. With svn it takes a couple of seconds on small repositories, and it can easily climb above ten seconds on larger repos. With git it very rarely rises above a second, even with a cold disk cache. The difference in speed is large enough that I find myself running "git status" far, far more often than I ever ran "svn status". A more dramatic example is 'git bisect' which, when given a command, it will do a binary search on the repository to find the commit which caused that command to begin to fail (return an exit code of something other than 0). Speed is a feature.