A sparse checkout isn't quite the same thing. It still has to clone the whole repository, it just only puts part of it in the working tree. With svn, you don't have to pull down anything for other directories. More recently, you can combine a sparse checkout with partial clone to get more similar functionality, but it isn't exactly simple.
That is yet a different concept, where it doesn't include the full history, but without a partial clone it still pulls the entire tree for the head commit.