Admittedly, I'm not a source control or git expert by any means. However, in a lot of work environments, it is a contest. Your company decides at the outset that they will commit to use a set of technologies for the next project and that's that.
I am personally looking at it from the outskirts as a guy trying to build a startup. When I look around for a library or plug-in I need, I end up on Github. When I look at cloud hosting providers like Heroku and AppHarbor (even though they've since added support for other source control tools), I see support for git.
I'm a machine learning guy, so my goal is to find the tools that minimize my time developing software and maximize my time discovering new AI algorithms. From that perspective, it is a competition: I do not have time nor care to tinker with all the different source control methods. I just want what works, and what works is git.
While I agree with this statement very much, and I know various different source control programs, I still from where I am standing feel like Git is something that new startups and people in generally work with.
It is one of the first features touted when a newer service comes to town (sometimes alongside Mercurial, but generally support for Mercurial comes after git).
I personally really enjoy git, I love what it has to offer, and honestly it has a better community aspect to it, Github is simply amazing, with Gitorious a close second and yes BitBucket exists, but it is not even close. It doesn't have the same community feel, pull requests are practically non-existent, the online tools are not that great (the wiki being a mercurial repo is actually pretty nice), and overall it just seems to have stagnated since being bought by Atlassian.
As for the corporate world, if you want in house solutions either has some choices. You can go with straight Git/Hg without a web front-end, you can use their built-in web front-ends or you can get something like Kiln and Gitorious (being open source is kinda nice really, low barrier to entry).
Where Git still lacks is on the Windows side of things, someone really should come along and write a Git compliant client that is more windows centric and runs correctly rather than having to have MingW installed and a whole range of other tools and utilities. The version also lacks behind somewhat so sometimes you may run into a bug that you can't replicate using a newer version (had a nasty merge that caused that issue, worked fine on my Mac, no so much on Windows).
Mercurial since it is entirely written in Python will work great on Windows. The TortoiseHg and TortoiseGit will always leave something to be desired but at least they exist and can make it somewhat easier, other than the fact that Git's terminology doesn't match up with Subversion or CVS (what most devs have used before).
Exactly! Just use what you like the best. There is no contest, there is no winner.
Saying git is the "clear winner" over hg or svn or what have you is like saying that ruby is a "clear winner" over python or c++ or whatever. It makes no sense.
