[cdavid]

The whole centralized vs distributed debate does not make much sense anyway, the choice of words is very poor. You almost always want to work on a common repository when working with other people - but the whole point of DVCS is that this common repository can be different for different usages (release vs development vs documentation vs testing ...). Something like subversion makes it very difficult to have several full fledge, synchronized repositories. Once you have a way to easily replicate live repo on the fly, you have already almost everything needed for a DVCS.

Also, something which is often overlooked: subversion was very poor even before DVCS came to light. It was only good at making sure everybody could work on the same snapshot. Branch management was inexistent not so long ago, no usable merge capabilities, awful interface to compare branches, etc... Just using git as a client to svn repository through git-svn already brings many advantages. Git-svn has saved me countless hours already compared to straight svn when working on public projects, especially for release management. svn log, blame, diff are slow to the point of being useless once you need to compare past revisions.