I switched from svn to hg for personal stuff too. Like the author of the blog post, I looked at git and found that it was nonintuitive. hg commands are close enough to svn commands that I felt more comfortable sooner.

I don't really get the big issue with branches in svn though. Branches and tags are "cheap" operations in svn, and making personal branches, etc. was something I used to do. Merging back into trunk was never a huge issue either. Maybe I've been lucky; also our team was not very big and different people weren't often working on the same source files at the same time.