I agree with your assessment. I think GUIs are great things that you don't do often enough to memorize (or for things that are inherintly visual, but not relevant here) but they are often looked down on.

There are many people who do enough git to know how it works well and be familiar enough with enough of the commands that they don't need a GUI and are likely faster on the command line. But for every one of those people there are at least 2 who would work faster, and more accurately with a good GUI.