You can even point to a specific commit hash. But no, it doesn't read any of the versioning. What if two different branches have the same version number?

The semver mechanism would be based on the tag, so it would not work when pointing to a specific commit hash (and you wouldn't want it to).

... You'd still miss out on the prepublish hook - one of the major reasons I've looked into using NPM Enterprise. Sometimes your package needs to do some housekeeping _before_ you publish, and the files generated by that should be distributed -- but not checked into source control.

That's a nice feature and all but not required to have proper git support.