[alkonaut]

If you want to visualize the topology of a nontrivial git history, It's several times better in a gui than as a tree drawn using slashes and pipes in a shell window. Compare a nice graphical tree with something you might get from "git log --graph --oneline --all" or a similar command. The shell window just isn't up to the task of drawing nice things, just like it doesn't show pictures very nicely by converting them to ascii.

If you want to see side-by side diffs that's also a lot better in a nice text editor than in a text window. Getting balloon tooltips when hovering commit hashes hidden in a gutter etc. allows more information to be fit onto the screen.

The reason you use a graphical UI is because a text ui doesn't fit all the information you want to show in a good way. Most git tools might not need show or draw a large amount of information (push/pull/commit/...) but some do (blame, log --graph for example).