There are plenty of abstractions on top of git - most UI implementations abstract away the hard details, at the cost of not being able to understand what happens when something bad occurs because you never had to learn its intricacies prior. Seeing the consequences of such things it makes me appreciate git is left as raw interactions. Git is not for people that do not want to understand it. To me, it's similar to vim - its basic implementation is bare essentials and complicated concepts, but once mastered, far outweigh competitors who roll those concepts up into simpler ones and leave you with workflows on their terms.
I completely agree with you here. Having used Visual Studio as my primary editor for a long time, I finally decided to give vim a try last year given how all my hacker friends raved about it. It definitely took a few days of understanding the basic concepts and going over the steep learning curve, but now I'm way more efficient with my coding than before.
It's been the same experience with git. It definitely has a steeper learning curve, especially coming from a centralized source control system like TFS and Perforce (for me at least), but having worked through that curve, I feel git has been much more useful to my workflows than what TFS or Perforce (or insert any central source control system) has ever been.
