git has a very steep learning curve and an interface only a mother could love. Mercurial on the other hand has a clean interface very similar to svn, and has all the advantages of git that you list above. And can be straightforwardly run over apache to boot. Also the command is one letter shorter than git.
Second, I don't think there is a steep learning curve for the subset included in my post.
Third, I think git has enough momentum that it makes sense for beginning programmers to focus on it. I suspect Mercurial will get a lower and lower percentage of the market place over time, because programmers will generally need to learn git at some point, and once they've done so, there is less reason for them to go against the tide on their next project by learning Mercurial. (An "increasing returns" situation.) Maybe I'm wrong about this -- it's just the sense I have. But, see this chart, which I think tends to validate it: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=git%2C%20svn%2C%20hg&...
> Mercurial will get a lower and lower percentage of the market place over time
Lots of big projects continue to use Hg, some even switching to it from Git (e.g. FB)
https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...
I also think this is a relatively old complaint. Git's interface has improved a lot in the 1.8-2.1 window of versions, and now gives pretty decent guidance on some of the hairier parts of itself even.