CVS certainly sucked by today's standards, and SVN was indeed a big improvement, and Git much more so.

All I wanted to stress is that the "lock-before-you-can-touch" approach was the norm in the enterprise world at the time. IMHO, this fact alone made SVN (even CVS) better than all the commercial products which I used at the time.

When some of the "enterprise" world started adopting SVN and commercial products started relaxing the locking mandate, the open-source world was already embarked on the decentralized model (git, darcs, arch, mercurial, etc).