Could you elaborate? In which way you feel that TortoiseHg lacks polish? I'm not saying it doesn't, but we are really trying to make it the best cross platform mercurial client out there and are always looking for ways to improve it. Suggestions and constructive criticism are always welcome!
I had the same issue this blogger describes regarding "No URL Selected". The solution is given in the comments. I did not review the whole post, but I think the post addresses some other issues as well that you might be interested in reviewing.
I also believe that installation on Linux could be more polished, but that is based on my experience from over six months ago, so I'm not sure if the process has been improved.
These are the first two things that come to mind since you asked. Overall, I find the program polished, and when I use it on Windows I find the shell integration convenient.
The blogger makes a few good points. I think part of the problem is that he seemed to expect TortoiseHg to hold his hand a little bit more while he was learning to use mercurial. Instead TortoiseHg expects you to have a basic understanding of the main mercurial concepts (i.e. clone vs push, etc). If you do I think the experience is much smoother, since we have been careful to follow mercurial's naming convenctions and workflow when possible.
In addition TortoiseHg has a pretty good (IMHO) online help that goes through some of these concepts and perhaps going through it would have helped him... Regardless I agree that the initial "new user" experience could be better and that expecting a user to RTFM is probably naive these days...
Out of the issues that are raised in that blog post I think the "No URL" one is the most serious. TortoiseHg should make it easy for you to understand and fix the problem. I am looking into it and hopefully it will be better handled on the next version of TortoiseHg (2.4).
What I plan to do, other than improving the error message itself, is to show the "Sync widget" whenever a user tries to push without having configured a remote repository first.
Please let me know of any other problems or improvements that you'd like to see, and I'll see if we can do something about them.
The other thing that comes to mind, which is minor, is that TortoiseGit and TortoiseSVN both have a place in the GUI settings where an SSH client can be specified (e.g., the path to Putty's plink.exe). I noticed that TortoiseHg does not have a similar setting in its global settings GUI, and must be configured manually in the config file.
