[badsectoracula]

The thing with Subversion's native support for the feature is that it is, well, native. No workarounds (using a local svn repo is extremely clunky) or external tools needed, the feature is part of the normal official workflow.

The issue isn't that it was technically impossible to do this before, it is that it wasn't something available out of the box back when it mattered. The feature was added several years after Git's dominance and by that point few people cared about Subversion.

[xorcist]

While not native, svk got pretty popular already in 2005, at a time when git was not used much outside LKML. Github wouldn't be released for a couple more years, which had a huge part in git dominance. Bazaar, darcs, Mercurial were all somewhat popular, but a pretty common question was what the killer feature really was that svn couldn't do.