Well, it's a little bit of work.
The point is that several people can maintain their own branches of /etc/hosts and use git to keep them up to date and propagate their additions.
I'd just clobber /etc/hosts from the repo file with cp -f, whenever the repo is changed, no need for any cron/init automation.
So could I get a little more detail here about why git is important? Are you making a init script to pull the file directly into /etc/hosts at boot (or at an interval)?