> I think it was actually extremely clear that Git would win. It had a guaranteed audience by virtue of hosting the Linux kernel. And forget even about its distributed nature; Git was already better at the centralized model than "centralized-only" version control systems ever were.

I think you're forgetting about Mercurial, which was also created by a Linux kernel developer around the same time. It brought all the same benefits of git, but had a simpler command line API and better cross platform support. Mercurial saw wide use, especially in large corporations like Facebook.

Indeed, a lot of people will say that it was the success of github itself that pushed git over the top. In a world where bitbucket won instead of github, we could all be using mercurial.

Although I've never used it, I'm not sure how much of an improvement either of these was over BitKeeper. The primary impetus to create git and mercurial was licensing changes in BitKeeper, not technical deficiencies.