Heh, I've never noticed git commit including new file permissions on commit; definitely confusing/useless. Don't think "it prints less information" in general is a particularly good argument for user-friendliness though; if anything, it's the exact opposite.
Trying out hg for the first time - "hg init; echo hello>world; hg commit" prints a "nothing changed" and I have no clue how to get it to commit my file! Whereas git says 'use "git add <file>..."', and, as that's already required for starting tracking a file in both hg and git, it's not entirely unreasonable that you'll need to do "add" upon modifications too.
So in hg you have to explicitly think about file tracking and get changes for free, whereas in git you have to explicitly think about changes and get tracking for free. Obviously I'm biased, but I think "I need to tell git what changes I want committed" is a nicer model than "I need to tell hg when it should realize a file has started existing"; the former is pretty uniformly annoying, whereas I imagine the latter quite often results in adding a file, forgetting to "hg add" it, and making a bunch of commits with changes in other files as the new file is intergrated, but never actually committing the new file itself, with zero warnings.
Git's staging/index, messy as it is (and with some utterly horrible naming), is extremely powerful, and I wouldn't accept any VCS without a sane simple equivalent. Extremely do not like that "hg commit -i", adding some parts manually, and deciding that I actually need to do something else before committing, loses all the interactive deciding I've done (maybe there's a way around that, but --help and "man hg" have zero useful info on interactive mode, not even what all the different (single-char..) actions are; granted, I don't really understand "git add -i" much either, and just use a GUI when necessary). In my git workflow I basically always have some changes that I won't want to commit in the next commit.
I think you are seeing it as a software developer as opposed to (say) a biologist on the first year of their PhD who just wants to keep their scripts safe. Mercurial's strong point (IMO) was to cater to the 90% of developers who work with two-to-three colleagues on a single branch - you could always make things more complex if needed (as evidenced by Firefox doing just fine), but the defaults were always more user-friendly than git's.
For a more time-appropriate critique, this post [1] from 2012 gives an overview of what working with Git felt like at the time when git was being popularized as an alternative to Subversion (including a frequent comment of "use Mercurial instead!"). It's also worth noting that git's error messages have become more helpful since - while the documentation for git-rebase used to be "Forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head", it now reads "Reapply commits on top of another base tip".
Software developers will be the vast majority of users though, at the very least for the CLI.
Git certainly isn't anywhere close to the prettiest thing for ease-of-learning (and indeed used to be even worse), but Mercurial didn't seem particularly good either. Really for the common uses the difference is just needing to do a "git add ." before every commit, vs a "hg add ." before some.
All of my git usage has been on projects with ≤2 devs (including me; technically excluding a few largely-one-off OSS contributions of course), but I still use a good amount of local temp branches / stashes / rebasing to organize things quite often (but also have some projects where all I've ever done is "git add .; git commit -m whatever").
Trying out hg for the first time - "hg init; echo hello>world; hg commit" prints a "nothing changed" and I have no clue how to get it to commit my file! Whereas git says 'use "git add <file>..."', and, as that's already required for starting tracking a file in both hg and git, it's not entirely unreasonable that you'll need to do "add" upon modifications too.
So in hg you have to explicitly think about file tracking and get changes for free, whereas in git you have to explicitly think about changes and get tracking for free. Obviously I'm biased, but I think "I need to tell git what changes I want committed" is a nicer model than "I need to tell hg when it should realize a file has started existing"; the former is pretty uniformly annoying, whereas I imagine the latter quite often results in adding a file, forgetting to "hg add" it, and making a bunch of commits with changes in other files as the new file is intergrated, but never actually committing the new file itself, with zero warnings.
Git's staging/index, messy as it is (and with some utterly horrible naming), is extremely powerful, and I wouldn't accept any VCS without a sane simple equivalent. Extremely do not like that "hg commit -i", adding some parts manually, and deciding that I actually need to do something else before committing, loses all the interactive deciding I've done (maybe there's a way around that, but --help and "man hg" have zero useful info on interactive mode, not even what all the different (single-char..) actions are; granted, I don't really understand "git add -i" much either, and just use a GUI when necessary). In my git workflow I basically always have some changes that I won't want to commit in the next commit.