Hg eventually came around but, for me, the damage had been done. It's the second biggest reason I went with git.
(The biggest, of course, is you use git if you want to interact with kernel devs. But lots of kernel devs hated git in 2005/2006. Mercurial had a reasonably big window of opportunity... all imo, fwiw)
Mercurial beat git past the starting gates, but git has the advantage of being used on a very widely used, widely developed, immensely high profile project. While Hg has its own commendable set of projects, git has simply won the mindshare battle.
Could be worse: there's arch and bzr and probably some others.
Hell, even GNU/EFF are looking to ditch their own VCS in favor of git from what I understand.
GNU Emacs decided to switch from bzr to git, but GNU as a whole doesn't have a recommended VCS yet. In GNU Octave we will keep using hg. I don't think the EFF is too public about which VCS they use.
But yes, I meant "FSF", not "EFF".
- Mercurial also has an email-centric workflow, look at its mailing list: http://mercurial.markmail.org/search/?q=#query:+page:1+mid:p...
- The staging area can be achieved in hg in several ways, or it can be avoided as desired. One easy way is to just pick apart your commit with hg (c)record --amend and just keep adding to your commit as necessary.
- Rebasing has also been available in hg forever (and wasn't available in git from the beginning). We also have some really interesting changes brewing for rebasing in Mercurial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OlDm3akbqg
These ideas in hg were all for following the Linux workflow too.
Nothing against git, but it's important to not deify Linus as if he were a unique genius. He has his flaws, and so does the software that he's responsible for.