I disagree, the basics are confusing, because there is too much state. I think gitless (http://gitless.com/#vs) shows how a less confusing version looks.
Reminds me of hg patch queues, which I've always found to be drastically more error prone than git's staging feature when trying to commit some but not all of the changes you've made, but I haven't tried gitless and it may do it better.
