I like rebase for this rather than merging the changes. But it's kind of strange to think of it as a problem that you'd need to acknowledge the other developers' work before committing...
Well, if 2 people are working on different files, they can commit their changes to svn without updating their local copy first. But in git you have to bring your copy to the same revision as the remote one, in order to push your changes, irrespective whether the changes you made our conflicting