Yes, we should.
Remember when GCC had no open source competition? Things have been much better since clang came out.
Or consider openssl since libressl came out. Yes it's possible that codebase improvements would have happened anyways, but having open source competition is great.
It obviously isn't 'factually' better - that's a matter of opinion not fact.
And in my experience, both Mercurial's model and UI is very over-complicated with far too many concepts. Git has a smaller number of simpler primitives and primitive operations. I think that makes the underlying model of Git better and that's why I prefer it.
Or consider openssl since libressl came out. Yes it's possible that codebase improvements would have happened anyways, but having open source competition is great.