This is not real life, this is a workflow, one of many. It happens to mirror mine though and, perhaps surprisingly, I can easily achieve the same workflow with

This is not real life, this is a workflow, one of many. It happens to mirror mine though and, perhaps surprisingly, I can easily achieve the same workflow with centralized VCS by using branches. It would be a major pain in CVS but works just fine for me (and others) in Perforce. So it can be done. What's interesting is what "it" means" and that you're proving one of the points author is making: your workflow doesn't rely on the fact that your VCS is decentralized. It relies on the fact that branching/forking is easy. Painful branching is quite often a matter of legacy since CVS and SVN were architected in different times when our needs were mostly different and technology was very different.