Cool, how do you merge After Effects, Autocad, Cinema 4D, Unreal 3 Packages, Illustrator, Sketch, Blender, XSi Lightwave or any other of the production packages that I've seen used in shipping actual products? What happens if no one used layers in your Photoshop file and collapsed history to save performance?
There's a reason Pixar and most mid-large game dev studios use Perforce or a similar tech, it's because fundamentally you need locking if you're working with binary assets.
Your intelligent merge tool has access to the file history. If one user modifies a layer, and the other one squashes them down, in the merge you probably want to apply the changes in that order, even if it's out-of-order chronologically. If the file format has a full edit history baked in, great; even more info for the intelligent merge. Maybe the in-file history can even be kept in sync with the repository level history.
In the current ecosystem you probably need locking for your sanity, but some day software will suck less.
I can't imagine this is intended to compete head-to-head with something like Perforce. As you've pointed out it simply can't. But for a repo that's mostly code with binary assets that get updated occasionally it's probably a god-send.
There's a reason Pixar and most mid-large game dev studios use Perforce or a similar tech, it's because fundamentally you need locking if you're working with binary assets.