I think you misunderstood. These "weird entities" that I mention are all part of mercurial. I feel like many of the people who complain that git is too complicated and hold up mercurial as a bastion of simplicity don't really know either of them.
To quote my other comment:
* Branches (named and unnamed) are part of core mercurial.
* Bookmarks are part of core mercurial.
* Multiple heads are part of core mercurial.
* Phases are part of core mercurial.
* Secret changesets is part of core mercurial.
* mq is distributed with Mercurial.
* Local branches is an extension that isn't part of core mercurial, I'll give you that. However, calling it a "third-party extension" is pedantic. It's listed on the official mercurial web site, and using extensions is much more a part of every day usage of mercurial than using extensions in git, for example.
To quote my other comment:
* Branches (named and unnamed) are part of core mercurial.
* Bookmarks are part of core mercurial.
* Multiple heads are part of core mercurial.
* Phases are part of core mercurial.
* Secret changesets is part of core mercurial.
* mq is distributed with Mercurial.
* Local branches is an extension that isn't part of core mercurial, I'll give you that. However, calling it a "third-party extension" is pedantic. It's listed on the official mercurial web site, and using extensions is much more a part of every day usage of mercurial than using extensions in git, for example.