Branches.

Branches in SVN are such a pain! If I recall correctly, creating a branch in SVN consists of making a full copy of everything (remotely, usually). In Git, creating a new branch consists of creating a new pointer to an existing commit.

Yes, branches look like full copies, but they are sparse copies. So only any changed data on the branch gets actually stored in the repository.

That's basically all it is in SVN as well...

And of course it's remote, every action in SVN is remote since it's centralized (except for shelving).