Git makes you believe it's lots of small little utilities that work together.
Far from it. Git relies on Perl or another scripting language, not to mention it's reliance on curl.
You cannot run Git without these other sizeable programs.
I can make static binaries of RCS, CVS and SVN no problem. CVS uses SSH. No silly SSL and the certificate mess. I value the simplicity.
Mercurial (which seems to be a favourite among connoisseurs of versioning systems) relies on a Python intepreter, but it's reasonably contained to a single Python script; no installation required. You point Python at hg and it works.
Of course, it's been said that most of the time people who ramble on and on about these systems and their esoteric features do not need the advanced features. They rarely use them, except as points in a debate over which versioning system is "the best".