Coming from CVS and ClearCase it took me some time to adopt to Git. The fact that it was distributed was confusing at first, for example, because I thought that would cause chaos. But the way we used it was actually not “that distributed”. But once I understood how it worked, not doing DVCS was “the wrong way” immediately.
Local vcs let’s you decouple saving progress (commit) from publishing your change (push).
This is a huge improvement over exclusive locks (old visual source safe) and shared server (like perforce).
There are many other improvements, but that is the one that had the most impact on my daily workflow.
I had a sad incident where I had committed changes but not pushed, and then I accidentally spilled a drink on my computer and bricked it. Even though this is unlikely to happen again because I won’t bring open containers like mugs or bowls of soup around computers anymore (water bottles are fine), and it was only three hours of work lost, because of this incident I do not feel I have saved until I have pushed. “What if you brick your computer again, huh, where’s all that progress now?”
But overall I agree about decoupling saving changes from actually publishing them!