> But I guess I couldn't read the future in terms of which one would win out!
After Linus Torvalds gave this talk at Google in 2007, it was clear he would win. (Is there a better quality video somewhere?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idLyobOhtO4
But I agree: Mercurial was definitely friendlier for people who didn't have time time to go through the technicalities of git. To use git smoothly you pretty much need to learn how it works internally.
To be entirely fair nothing in git backend prevents someone to make friendlier frontend.
Case in point is Magit, I use Mercurial almost every day at work so git got a bit unfamiliar, but Magit is still more natural then mercurial for me.