Having a local backup of the repo and making branching/merging very cheap reduces the friction in several VC operations. You can use techniques such as bisect* without cumulative network latency disrupting your train of thought. Also, when throwaway branches are cheap, you'll probably find you use them quite a bit more.<p>* For finding what commit introduced a bug, by binary search. Flag a revision as the last known good commit, then bisect will switch to a one in-between, wait for you to test and mark it as good or bad, then repeat. Better yet, just provide a test suite and it will classify the revision automatically.<p>It's somewhat comparable to incremental programming with a REPL, rather than a compile-link-test cycle. Sure, you only get feedback on your code "slightly faster", but that makes a tremendous difference.<p>Git is hyped pretty hard (software hipsters seem to be gaga over it, probably in part because of <i>gasp</i> Linus), but if you ignore all that, it is a pretty good version control system.