>It's not that easy at this point in time. git carries a lot of momentum, especially in combination with GitHub.

CVS back then was like this too, including public repos, etc.

>At the time git became successful there were arguably better systems like mercurial

I specifically mentioned Mercurial above because they both emerged pretty simultaneously responding to the same challenges, and Mercurial happened to be just inferior due to its design choices. Companies were jumping onto it too, for example our management back then chose it, and it was a predictable huge pain in the neck, and some years down the road it was replaced with git.