In Magit you can easily select arbitrary regions of code to stage (or chunks as you would via the command line). I haven't seen any git interface that is as intuitive for this task.
Try pressing `S` in `tig`. Works like magit but is much faster(when I say faster I'm also including interface lag). I realize that you won't switch, nor do you need to, but the general things people suggest of why magit is superior exist elsewhere as well.
Thanks for the tip, I haven't tried tig yet. That might actually be useful on remote systems in situations where I don't have access to my personally configured emacs.
I actually use the git-gutter.el package alongside magit to do the arbitrary region work, and find it to fill the last gap between magit and the built-in version control commands.