[maaku]

Monotone got the user experience right. The git interface simply exposes the atomic operations of commit-tree management. Monotone, on the other hand, provides an abstraction on top of that which maps quite well to how people actually use a DCVS. Doing anything more than the standard edit-commit-fetch-merge-push cycle on git is like casting an arcane spell. The equivalent operation on monotone is either a) nothing, because monotone automatically handles that high-level operation for you, or b) intuitively obvious and simple to construct.

More fundamentally, monotone records both manifest and diff history, which from the git point of view is entirely redundant. However it allows monotone to do much more sophisticated merge handling than out-of-the-box git, and better captures the human intent of a changeset. It allows monotone to correctly handle copy operations, for example, which is relevant in the context of history-rewriting operations.