I do use standard Mercurial branches, and I vastly prefer Git's model. I ask because there might be a better way to use them that I've overlooked.

Mercurial's equivalent to git branches (movable pointer to a commit rather than embedded commit metadata) is bookmarks.

From what I've seen, bookmarks are not "branches" in any sense, really just pointers to commits.

I've tried several times to use bookmarks for feature branches (read: branches developed in parallel to each other and the default branch). I thought I just can't figure it out, but it really seems impossible at this point.

> From what I've seen, bookmarks are not "branches" in any sense, really just pointers to commits.

That's exactly what git branches are.

Branches in git are exactly pointers to graph. If you delete such a pointer you loose your branch.

Even worse - with next git gc you will loose your data as parts of graph with no pointer is assumed to be dead by git.

What do you mean by "git model"? Creating branch per feature? But that's exactly what I do in mercurial!