It also was designed for a use case that almost no one actually does which is distributed version control.
Most people use it like a svn with better branching and merging.
Everybody who's ever forked a project on GitHub is using it as distributed version control, and that's a lot of people, so I don't know why you say almost no one actually does distributed version control.
I'm quite certain most of these are sure they are using github and see no difference between it and Git; and "version control" term gives them headaches in same way as "currying" or "first-class function".