I'd suggest that well-chosen defaults means: Make a pretty good guess at the most common usage patterns you expect most of your users to follow, and have your defaults do that by default.

I can't comment on whether or not svn/hg/bzr/git/darcs have well-chosen defaults. I only know that I hear it's a common complaint about git.

I've used git since the early days, and I have trouble using svn and p4 now. Subversion and Perforce should choose better defaults.