Branching is one of the big differences. I find Mercurial's named branches mostly useless; fortunately, with some care, bookmarks can be used to simulate Git-style branches.
I think, early on, the Mercurial community favored cloning as the means of creating feature branches, while Git used named branches to do so. But in many cases you want to be able to switch lines of development in a single repository (especially when using a workspace-based IDE like Eclipse), so the Git model becomes a win.
I think, early on, the Mercurial community favored cloning as the means of creating feature branches, while Git used named branches to do so. But in many cases you want to be able to switch lines of development in a single repository (especially when using a workspace-based IDE like Eclipse), so the Git model becomes a win.