Advice to new DVCS users: Start with Git, not Mercurial. If you start with Mercurial, you will get used to obvious and simple things being obvious and simple, which will make the idiosyncrasies of Git seem even more idiosyncratic.

Mercurial OTOH is just so intuitive: http://hginit.com/

my first experience with git was after years and years of mercurial

I still have PTSD from that

example:

git cherrypick

vs:

hg graft

even the fucking names show a different form of thought. Cherrypicking is a perfectionist endeavour of tossing stuff around to find 1 nugget, whilst Grafting is the act of adding sth to an existing thing (like an apple tree)