Mercurial has both "real" branches (history is kept so you can always tell what revisions were in what branch) as well as git "branch is just a pointer tag"

So really you can choose whatever suits your needs.

Personally the things I love about mercurial are:

    more consistent commandline (that's the simple part others bring up)
    revsets (awesome query language for revisions, there's also filesets, but I don't use that as much)
    absorb  (I think someone added a git extension that does something similar a few months ago)
    fa --deleted 
    grep --all  
    phases ♥