The problem is that with SVN, you can get in gradually. To start, the branchless approach still gets you a great service - obviously an incomplete one, but better than not having source control at all. And you can have leaders who are the only people who have to think about branching and merging and have people very gradually move into that role.
Git seems to force you to dive straight into the deep-end, since everything is a branch, even your own local working folder.
Branches are fundamentally little more than text files in .git/refs/heads that contain the sha of a commit object. Don't let the idea of a branch frighten you, there isn't much complexity behind the idea.
Git seems to force you to dive straight into the deep-end, since everything is a branch, even your own local working folder.