I can teach Mercurial to CEO's, artists, students, etc. and some of them will be better than me on it with a week or two. All of them "get it" and it's "low friction"--they can commit and forget about it. People who need it can handle merging and the rest can ignore it. People who need branches can use it and the rest can ignore it. etc.

git doesn't allow this. git is all or nothing. Either you inload the whole mental model, or you WILL wedge your repository somehow when you execute a command that doesn't quite do what you think it does. At that point, you will spend 4 hours combing Stack Overflow for the answer. Or you will just pull up the filesystem copy of the git repo you made before executing any command other than "git pull" or "git clone".