I'm just saying in your case it seems as if people are busy enough as is. Switching VCS will disrupt workflow as they learn. My experience is that branches, while a pain in non-git systems are still used in the places you really want them to be used (release management), and most of the other features are mostly in the "nice to have" category. At that point it seems a better idea to simply use git-svn so you have the power of git without having to force a change in infrastructure.

(Incidentally, you can turn off subversion's auto-updating. I try to keep all my computers running the exact same version of subversion for largely the same reasons you mention.)