Hi,
I worked with TortoiseHg some time, I thought I could get used to it, but to no avail.
From my experience, I can only say that almost *everything* is non
trivial or doesn't work Apart from the shitty interface. I just tested the latest version again, it's completely unintuitive, and merging gave me even more conflicts than I would have expected with SVN.
My experience with using a branch with TSVN is that there's no problem. Even merging hundreds of revisions from trunk to the branch worked quite well with rarely any conflicts and it's done with a few clicks.
We don't need a different versioning system, we need a better source organisation. Independency of modules. Independency from the tools/sdk. That would also help with working on branches.
Just my 2 cents, Timo