A lot of things in Mercurial kind of geared you towards using it more like Subversion was used. You pretty much could use Mercurial just like git was, and is, used, but the defaults didn't guide you to that direction.
One bigger difference I can think of is, Mercurial has permanently named branched (branch name is written in the commit), whereas in git branches are just named pointers. Mercurial got bookmarks in 2008 as an extension, and added to the core in 2011. If you used unnamed branches and bookmarks, you could use Mercurial exactly like git. But git was published in 2005.
Another is git's staging area. You can get pretty much the same functionality with repeatedly using `hg commit --amend` but again, in git the default gears you towards using the staging approach, in Mercurial you have specifically search for a way to get it to function this way.
One bigger difference I can think of is, Mercurial has permanently named branched (branch name is written in the commit), whereas in git branches are just named pointers. Mercurial got bookmarks in 2008 as an extension, and added to the core in 2011. If you used unnamed branches and bookmarks, you could use Mercurial exactly like git. But git was published in 2005.
Another is git's staging area. You can get pretty much the same functionality with repeatedly using `hg commit --amend` but again, in git the default gears you towards using the staging approach, in Mercurial you have specifically search for a way to get it to function this way.