>Git won because it's workflow is so much better than mercurial's.
This is quite subjective. A more probable reason is that git is popular because of github..
And once git gained some popularity, people started viewing other DVCS as inferior because they were doing things differently from Git. For eg, the branching in Mercurial. People are appalled when they see how named branches can be done in Mercurial. Without going into any thought or reflection on how Mercurial's named branching can be useful in certain situations, they call it braindead. But actually git's branching is quite simple and less powerful than the methods offered by Mercurial. Less powerful, because Mercurial offers multiple methods to make a branch so that you can use the right one for a particular situtation. Note that this actually asks for more experience from the user. He needs to have experience with using each of these methods and should know how each of them may be useful in the future. It also stores more metadata and tools like revset which lets you to build powerful queries. So in that sense, Mercurial is also more complex than Git. But that is in a good way and unlike git's, it is not the complexity that gets in your way.
So in short, I think git is actually quite simple than Mercurial, but hides that simplicity behind a complex interface with non-intuitive naming and weird combination of flags and stuff. This causes the 'Aha' moments when one can finally see the simplicity that hides behind that interface, which trigger a huge release of Dopamine and prompts the user to write his own set of Git revelations that (used to) flood the internet, which in turn increases the popularity of Git...
This is quite subjective. A more probable reason is that git is popular because of github..
And once git gained some popularity, people started viewing other DVCS as inferior because they were doing things differently from Git. For eg, the branching in Mercurial. People are appalled when they see how named branches can be done in Mercurial. Without going into any thought or reflection on how Mercurial's named branching can be useful in certain situations, they call it braindead. But actually git's branching is quite simple and less powerful than the methods offered by Mercurial. Less powerful, because Mercurial offers multiple methods to make a branch so that you can use the right one for a particular situtation. Note that this actually asks for more experience from the user. He needs to have experience with using each of these methods and should know how each of them may be useful in the future. It also stores more metadata and tools like revset which lets you to build powerful queries. So in that sense, Mercurial is also more complex than Git. But that is in a good way and unlike git's, it is not the complexity that gets in your way.
So in short, I think git is actually quite simple than Mercurial, but hides that simplicity behind a complex interface with non-intuitive naming and weird combination of flags and stuff. This causes the 'Aha' moments when one can finally see the simplicity that hides behind that interface, which trigger a huge release of Dopamine and prompts the user to write his own set of Git revelations that (used to) flood the internet, which in turn increases the popularity of Git...