With that usage, you don't need to understand the implementation. But in my experience of using Git without really understanding it, there is about a 90% chance of destroying your repository when you try to revert something. I have never had this problem with any other VCS.
I'm sure simple reverting is super easy once you know what you're doing, but you need to know what you're doing.
Well that does look simple, but first of all, it doesn't really revert a commit. It makes a new commit to cancel out the old one, or something. Not intuitive, unexpected results if you don't know what you're doing.
But the situation I got into was when I did something stupid and just wanted to undo it. Let me go back to an hour ago before I screwed up my project. That's not revert, it's reset, but reset only reverts the commit history, you really want reset --hard. And of course you need to be pointing to the right place for this to work, and there are other ways for it to go wrong. It might be hard to imagine if you're at all competent with Git, but trust me when I say you can get yourself into some very frustrating scenarios if you just Google "undo push" and blindly follow the instructions.
Here's another simple scenario: I'm working on a bug, my friend fixes it first and pushes his version. I just want to pull his changes and throw away whatever I was working on. Ok, so I find this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1125968/force-git-to-over...
Look how many different methods there are. Look how many warnings of "THIS WILL DELETE ALL UNTRACKED FILES" there are. Why is this necessary? I could rant for a while longer, but this stuff is so incredibly unfriendly and frustrating to newcomers. I don't want to think about this stuff, I just want to go back to the code.
And yet every time I looked at the docs for git in the two or three years I was using it heavily I happened upon these dire warnings about destroying and losing work. I understand why git is so powerful, and to manage something as complex as the Linux kernel that power matters.
For what I do for a living it isn't, and Mercurial is a nice alternative that for whatever reason doesn't have any scary warnings in the docs about how I can destroy everything if I revert or rebase inappropriately, or whatever. Mercurial also seems a lot more aggressive about checking if I'm doing something stupid or dangerous and warning me about it, whereas git takes more of the traditional Unix "You Asked For It You Got It" philosophy.
Again: I understand why this is the case, but it's not the optimal tradeoff for me.
I'm sure simple reverting is super easy once you know what you're doing, but you need to know what you're doing.