I hated git and felt much like the author did when I first started using it. Git has some problems. Of course some of the problems stem from its features. To me its biggest feature is "branching" and I'm guessing this is why many people like it. It makes it trivial to work on multiple bugs fixes at one time, without mixing code. Checking in locally can be nice, but I agree, why do I have to do that when I'm networked? But the power of the simple branches pretty much outweighs all the negatives. And of course it would be nice to have some good GUIs