In an ideal world -- one where network effects of GitHub hadn't crushed all competition -- I'd get to choose Mercurial as my daily version-control system. It has similarities to git, in that both are largely user interfaces to a DAG, but its guiding philosophy and approach to the interface it exposes are far better in my opinion.
In my opinion Git is the C language of version control systems. If you are careless it's not the tool for you.
You probably don't want to make that assertion; we now have close to half a century of evidence that no human currently living can use C safely, and I don't think you'd want that to carry over to git. And it's not a matter of "careless" or not -- extremely intelligent, extremely-well-trained, extremely-careful people still write unsafe C.
You're right that C is the wrong tool for a lot of applications. But if you need total control and speed and power it still works for many projects.
Be that as it may, it's a common misconception that the more popular tool is always the better tool. There are a lot of factors to a tool's success and the technical ones are generally far less important than most people think.
Brushing aside some relatively minor differences, Mercurial is very similar to Git, except that it was designed by people that don't have an all-consuming disdain for all of humankind.
Not saying I disagree... but subversion is still king in the corporate-engineering companies and it tends to work well in those types of setups.
Just beware of having unjustified-opinions. SVN may not be trendy... but neither will git in a few years time.
BTW: Mercurial still beats them all.
For some values of "work". We're using SVN at my new job, with a single trunk branch. Not having the ability to commit locally, and mess around with local branches is a pain in the ass. I found a solution though. I cloned SVN repo using git-svn and now I can make local commits like a pro, and use my beloved magit (Emacs git interface).
(I used git in an cvs-to-svn migration, and stayed since.)
I know that many people don't like it, but I can fix up commits in my local repository and push the change upstream in one.
With SVN I wasn't able to do this, so it was a big pain if you had to fix a bug if you were in the middle of a big feature, or if you had an experimental feature you wanted to clean up and release a month later.
I don't know any of the other distributed version control systems. The only other version control system I have much (too much) experience with is Subversion and it can't hold a candle against Git.
In my opinion Git is the C language of version control systems. If you are careless it's not the tool for you. Otherwise you have a really great tool with lots of power.