> Well I can explain git to anybody who understands a DAG.

This. Right here. This is the difference.

I can explain Mercurial to people who don't want to understand a DAG.

For non-professional developers, the "merge machinery" is completely worthless.

The difference is that Mercurial lets you duck it until you need it while Git slaps you in the face with it at every commit.

For the non-professional developer, the flow is "commit, commit, commit, commit, whoops--how many commits do I need to go back to fix things?, oh, 2, okay--revert, commit, commit, commit, commit, ...

At no point in their day are they facing "merge". And that makes all the difference.