You seem to have ignored what I said... this insistence that "people can still commit their code locally" is focussing on just one of the use cases for this website. To read jtchang's comment, it is as if that's the only service that GitHub provides.

In fact, "git hosting" is one of the least interesting services GitHub provides for the specific reason that, yes, git is so ludicrously decentralized: it seriously takes less time to push to your own git repository than it takes to log in to your GitHub account.

(Really, the only thing it makes simpler, with regards to actual git hosting, is managing user credentials for a centralized Subversion-like repository; however, if you actually think of git as a decentralized system you don't do that in the first place.)

I will thereby attempt to make this point even more clear by taking my example about Gmail (where you totally ignored the Calendar comment) and ratchet it even further: if all of Google went offline tomorrow, my ability to still send mail using Outlook is great, but it doesn't help me watch YouTube videos or, you know, search the web.

Likewise, when GitHub has an "outage across all services" that affects all kinds of things developers do that have nothing at all to do with "hosted git repository". To repeat one example: a lot of developers are crippled if they don't have access to an issue tracker to tell them what they need to work on next.

So, just because your workflow doesn't rely on anything GitHub provides, doesn't mean that isn't why most of the people who use GitHub aren't using it: GitHub is a popular set of services for project management that are all bundled together in a way that is easy for people to get started with, not just a git hosting company.