You're forgetting history- BitKeeper, mostly. The way I heard it told, Larry McVoy sat down and showed it off to Linus, who finally said "ah yes, this is a tool and model that would improve my life."

git didn't come along until Bitkeeper withdrew their support, after a prolonged series of arguments with kernel developers mad about a private company owning the code repository.

I guess I'm saying you should give credit to Larry McVoy for showing the way.