[mindcrime]

You can't pull a portion of the repo because the current state of the repo is built from the tree of commit diffs... This and the fact that git itself is a hash database leads to very efficient use of space.

Sure, but knowing that is essentially irrelevant if your workflow involves a need to check out a partial tree, and Git makes it (hard|impossible|unwieldy|whatever) to do that.

If you want a single folder within a repo, why isn't that folder its own repo?

Because needless proliferation of tiny repos is a problem in its own right?

and the unfortunate advocacy of SVN... ugh.

There's nothing unfortunate about advocating SVN, if SVN is a better fit for your workflow - and by extension, presumably, someone else's workflow which happens to mirror yours.