Although I'm not a power user, I believe mercurial can do pretty much most things that git does - including editing history. They just make the easy stuff easy and make the advanced stuff harder - as opposed to git which puts them all on an equal footing.
For history editing, people use the evolve extension in mercurial. It'll likely never become part of the default mercurial because there is a small chance of breaking backward compatibility.
Even before the evolve extension, there were ways to modify mercurial history.
Yes, mercurial docs leave something to be desired. But the actual interface is much cleaner than git's, and is much more newbie friendly, without really losing anything sophisticated.
As another user said in another comment:
>It's easier to transition to Mercurial but once you find you need to dive deep, it's just about as complex as git. Git seems to throw you in the deep end immediately which I do think is more of a blessing than a curse but there are times when it doesn't quite feel that way.
