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.
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!