@arclight Something that is free and sufficient tends to win, and git's selling point is that your source control problem is not as challenging as the problems it was created to solve.

The terminology mostly comes in because it isn't doing commit, branch, and merge, it's using a distinct abstraction, and the words for the abstraction weren't there so people just grabbed whatever didn't run away quickly enough. I agree that the result is horrid confusing. (git-scm docs make a heroic effort.)