I only suggested the diff/patch workflow for the simple case where you realized after making edits that you were in the wrong branch. It might even be possible to just update to the correct branch and have mercurial automatically try to remerge your changes, though I haven't tried to know for certain. I think you're taking my suggestion way out of context, though I could be misunderstanding you.
Mercurial has remote-trackable bookmarks now (something I felt they needed for a long time). I agree Mercurial's branch tracking in general isn't nearly as good as git's, local branches being the biggest example. There is a local branch extension for mercurial (http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/LocalbranchExtension), but having used it a long time ago I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan.
However, I firmly believe that mercurial is in the same league as git and both are more than good enough to get the job done, and each have their relative strengths and weaknesses. I also believe that the outspoken part of the git community tends to be overzealous and blind to git's faults and Mercurial's strengths.
Mercurial has remote-trackable bookmarks now (something I felt they needed for a long time). I agree Mercurial's branch tracking in general isn't nearly as good as git's, local branches being the biggest example. There is a local branch extension for mercurial (http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/LocalbranchExtension), but having used it a long time ago I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan.
However, I firmly believe that mercurial is in the same league as git and both are more than good enough to get the job done, and each have their relative strengths and weaknesses. I also believe that the outspoken part of the git community tends to be overzealous and blind to git's faults and Mercurial's strengths.