[ziml77]

> but so is the ability to actually incrementally change and back up your code

Backing up the code is why I will end up with multiple WIP commits when working on a large change. I want to get it pushed to the remote to not risk losing large amounts of work if something happens to my local copy. It's also nice knowing that if an emergency or something keeps me away from work for some time, the work I was doing could be picked up by a coworker without needing to convince InfoSec to provide them access to poke around the drive of my PC.

[seba_dos1]

That's exactly what makes distributed version control systems so powerful. Your local WIP commits, even when pushed out to a remote backup branch, have generally nothing to do with what you push out for others to review and integrate into working branch. Working this way with systems like Subversion would be much harder, if not impossible.