Mercurial is the obvious first alternative. It supports many of the same concepts as git but with a lower barrier to entry. A lot of this has probably been said many times before but I feel it's worth reiterating.

1. No staging area. This makes commit+push a 2 phase operation rather than 3 phase and removes a lot of confusing concepts, state and commands. Selectively commiting files and chunks of files is still possible but it is all done in the commit operation. (It doesn't track the history of an edit as git does where you can skip the last edit in one file but who really uses this feature? If you are such advanced user you might as well use stash or amend your last commit)

2. Branches are not just pointers to the tip of a graph. This makes it easier to understand what was master and what was dev after a merge and master can't suddenly point elsewhere.

3. All command line commands are sane by default as opposed to git where you almost always need at least one flag to get correct behaviour. And there is usually only one way to do things right.

4. Incremental version numbers (locally only) makes it look more friendly than commit hashes.

5. Much better GUI tools available. Dont know why since the market is smaller but probably because of a less complicated internal model it's easier to make a GUI representing it.

Even with all those i still don't know if it is easy enough for non developers, or if any scm with a commit/push/pull model ever can be. The whole concept of merge conflicts is very complicated and even seasoned developers need to go get an extra cup of coffee when a conflict pops up in the middle of what you expected to be a trivial rebase.

The only way to avoid merge conflicts fully would be instant edits such as Google docs but I don't think that would work very good for code where different people would break the build constantly.

As a flippant replier, it's partly motivated by not really thinking other VCSes have a chance.

As confusing to use as Git's UI may be, I think the only way we're getting away from it is if someone massive pushes an alternative.

Alexa.com has Github trending down six places to the 66th most visited page on the internet. Worldwide. That's not just programmers that's everyone.

> not really thinking other VCSes have a chance

There's no reason the world has to universally adopt one true VCS.

I can observe that other VCSes today are unlikely to thrive without making the proclamation that there can be only one. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.