I'm aware that they're shipped but disabled by default. I think there's something of mental blind-spot, however, because they're discouraged or treated as something only experts should use: I've never seen anything like the level of obscure error messages or cumbersome UI in any part of Mercurial which is enabled by default. I think it deserves more respect as a valid working style.
I would disagree with the statement regarding history rewriting and non-expert users, to note two exceptions: Git's amend commits are extremely easy to explain and rebase is not that much harder for common cases. These same users are going to have issues with merges and rely on good tool support nearly as much in that situation, too.
What I think would be welcome in Git is the very nice phased commit feature you mentioned. That's a great example of where the concern should have been directed towards the UI rather than the operation.
I would disagree with the statement regarding history rewriting and non-expert users, to note two exceptions: Git's amend commits are extremely easy to explain and rebase is not that much harder for common cases. These same users are going to have issues with merges and rely on good tool support nearly as much in that situation, too.
What I think would be welcome in Git is the very nice phased commit feature you mentioned. That's a great example of where the concern should have been directed towards the UI rather than the operation.