> You have your own copy of all the branches which you are free to do whatever you want with.
That's the default. But git would work just as well, if by default it was only cloning master, or even only the last few commits from master instead of the full history.
You can get that behaviour today, with some options. But we can imagine an alternate universe were the defaults were different.
Most of what you say, eg about not needing lockfiles and being able to make independent offline commits, still applies.
