> Git allows the topic-branch development style, where you maintain one short-lived branch for every task you work on. Like many people, I learned about this style from distributed version control. I love it. It’s an excellent way to switch between tasks, and maps well to the way I actually think about the state of the project. But you don’t need Git to do this! Subversion has “svn switch”. It does have an annoying problem that if you specify the wrong URL to switch to, it will trash your local copy rather badly. However, Subversion seems to have fixed that problem in version 1.7.
Quite an annoying problem. I'm not really sure why the author is a git skeptic if it enables and introduced him or her to a wonderful workflow.
The ability to easily work on multiple branches and make offline commits is a huge selling point for any DVCS. I really like git rebase and git add -p now as direct arguments for git, but wouldn't have used them right away.
Edit: added clarification after quote