This is not the same. Well, it's sort of the same infrastructure, but it would require a lot of work to actually work like hg evolve.
With Evolve, there is something similar to .git/refs/replace, called obsolescence markers, which may or may not indicate which commit replaces the obsolete commit (some commits are replaced, others are just pruned). These markers are created automatically every time you rewrite history. They don't have to be created manually like with git replace. Moreover, the obsolete commits are hidden from the UI unless you pass the --hidden argument to commands. Lastly, these obsolescence markers are propagated with push and pull operations. It doesn't seem to me like git replace can work over the wire?
> It doesn't seem to me like git replace can work over the wire?
I thought that being in the /refs/ namespace would make them eligible for easy synchronization once set up, but on second thought it doesn't seem like it. Git examines parents of refs to determine when something needs to be updated, but would use the parent of the object replacement in this case.
I think a mechanism similar to "git notes" would be better, where the ref points to a history of commits with each tree containing files for each replaced object. I've hacked git to do this at one point so we could retroactively edit git commit messages, but abandoned the effort after discovering "git notes".
http://git-scm.com/blog/2010/03/17/replace.html
It requires some manual setup on all checkouts for the changes to propagate automatically.