Gitlab team is making great software - basicaly they've copied what's best in Github and released it to the world allowing you to set up your own git hosting service (accessible only by your team). In my opinion it's great piece of software as long, as you don't want to share your code with anyone out there (beside your teammates). Ergo - it's better imo for students, as long, as they have machine that will be able to host it (VPS basically).
I set this up at my university to see if it would be a good solution for school-related project hosting. Haven't rolled out (yet), but as you said it's very promising.