I'm sorry man, I have to disagree with this ... I watched git take off with the launch of github, and I've seen enough people moved to git because of github to tell you that ... sure git would be successful, but without the mindshare of github in the developer community, it would not be as popular as it is now. at. all.

When git was announced, I got it and played around with it for a bit, but I went back to svn, it was only with all the OSS that I cared about working with (rails gems anyone?) or on that I started caring about git in a serious way. I'm only one datapoint though.