I've only recently started to use mercurial in earnest for one project (legacy reasons). It's branches for me too. At least considering my experience with it is limited.
I don't like how every time you pull someone else's changes you end by default in a state that is probably similar with git's detached head. With git, most of the time you are on a named branch, you know where you are and you pull/push stuff out of said named branch. With mercurial some of the branches are unnamed and it's still confusing why I'd want that. Perhaps the original designers didn't like having private local-only named branches, I don't know.
This may just be an artefact of my very limited experience with hg though.
When not sharing with others, bookmarks is the way to go - not branches. Mercurial bookmarks act more like git's branches. I think they've now made it so that you can share them too, but since no one else at work uses mercurial, I don't have experience with distributed bookmarks.
I don't like how every time you pull someone else's changes you end by default in a state that is probably similar with git's detached head. With git, most of the time you are on a named branch, you know where you are and you pull/push stuff out of said named branch. With mercurial some of the branches are unnamed and it's still confusing why I'd want that. Perhaps the original designers didn't like having private local-only named branches, I don't know.
This may just be an artefact of my very limited experience with hg though.