Git Is Simpler Than You Think
The whole "downloading history of the repository onto your machine" thing about git is what makes it unworkable where I work. A normal checkout from SVN is over 3GB in size just for our team's tree. There are a number of binaries that get pulled in and updated for various reasons (SDKs, platform-specific binaries) and they are versioned for repeatable and automatable builds across branches, all self-contained with minimal dependencies. I dread to think what the entire history would take - it must be many 100s of GBs at least. It would certainly rule out the whole "working disconnected" idea on laptops, for one.