Recently I wanted to understand in a git repository what was different on the remote vs what I had locally.

The best I could stackoverflow for git was "git fetch; git whatchanged ..origin"

In Mercurial its even better (since it doesn't modify anything locally like git fetch does): hg incoming

Want to see what will be pushed? hg outgoing

When I use Mercurial I just don't think about it as much, it does what I expect it to do, which is something that is easy to take for granted.