I don't think that's the case. I work at a startup with a fairly permissive commit policy (forgiveness > permission), and because of how Github is architected, we have to put policies in place about which branches someone can/should commit to in READMEs (branch X should always build, branch Y should is where code get staged for tested, and so forth), instead of within the tooling.

As someone at Google once said, "If your policy doesn't exist in software, it doesn't exist."

How can essential Git features be a mismatch? For example, the CI can sign release tags, and you can deploy them with confidence. GitHub is not a small company. Gitolite is developed mainly by a single guy. Okay, there's no pretty UI, but developing one nowadays is not a huge task. The way Gitolite can handle a significant feature set is very elegant! I'm surprised GitHub behaves like they don't know about the existence of Gitolite!