They're not necessarily mutually exclusive, but in my experience there's often a trade off. I would argue that git is about as simple to as it can be without taking power away from the user by forcing an abstraction on him.
> What is it in git's architecture and design that mandates that a file should be removed with "rm", a branch with "branch -D" and a remote with "remote remove"?
Yeah... I have to agree that the choice of command line arguments is the weakest element of git.
> What does "intuitive" mean if not "easy to learn"?
The two often go together, but aren't necessarily the same thing. Something is "intuitive" if the correct thing to do is natural and obvious without a whole lot of thought. Git isn't intuitive before you understand the data model, but once you do, you don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to accomplish things, so it becomes intuitive. I would argue that by contrast, subversion is intuitive out of the box, but as soon as you want to do more sophisticated things it becomes rapidly counter-intuitive and very difficult to work with.
