I'm going to take a stab here: you've never used cvs or svn. git, for all its warts, is quite literally a 10x improvement on those, which is what it was (mostly) competing with.
I started my career with Clearcase (ick) and added CVS for personal projects shortly after. CVS always kind of sucked, even compared with Clearcase. Subversion was a massive improvement, and I was pretty happy with it for a long time. I resisted moving from Subversion to Git for a while but eventually caved like nearly everyone else. After learning it sufficiently, I now enjoy Git, and I think the model it uses is better in nearly every way than Subversion.
But the point of the parent of your post is correct, in my opinion. The Git interface sucks. Subversion's was much more consistent, and therefore better. Imagine how much better Git could be if it had had a little more thought and consistency put into the interface.
I thought it was pretty universally agreed that the Git interface sucks. I'm surprised to see someone arguing otherwise.
Subversion was a major improvement over CVS, in that it actually had sane branching and atomic commits. (In CVS, if you commit multiple files, they're not actually committed in a single action - they're individual file-level transactions that are generally grouped together based on commit message and similar (but not identical!) timestamps.) Some weirdness like using paths for branching, but that's not a big deal.
I actually migrated my company from CVS to SVN in part so we could do branchy development effectively, and also so I personally could use git-svn to interact with the repo. We ended up eventually moving Mercurial since Git didn't have a good Windows story at the time. Mercurial and Git are pretty much equivalent in my experience, just they decided to give things confusing names. (git fetch / pull and hg fetch / pull have their meanings swapped)
At least one person (me) thinks that: git interface is good enough as is (function>form here), regexps are not too terse - that’s the whole point of them.
It's really hard to overstate how much of a sea change git was.
It's very rare that a new piece of software just completely supplants existing solutions as widely and quickly as git did in the version control space.
And all that because the company owning the commercial version control system they had been using free of charge until that point got greedy, and wanted them to start paying for its use.
Their greed literally killed their own business model, and brought us a better versioning system. Bless their greedy heart.
