the basic features of git can be readily used without any knowledge of command line tools
I don't think the command line is the greatest barrier for wider git use in academia.
I think that it takes some time to wrap your head around the pull-edit-commit-edit-commit-...-push workflow and that merging, branching, forking and pull-requesting (not to mention cherry-picking, rebasing and other horrors) are not so simple. So I think there is a steep learning curve, but it can be mitigated with new online courses such as the one offered by code school and github.
Also maybe half a paragraph on git gui and maybe even a screenshot? That readers will not be intimidated by the command line nature of the tool. Here's an example of git-gui on windows:
Although I agree that:
I don't think the command line is the greatest barrier for wider git use in academia. I think that it takes some time to wrap your head around the pull-edit-commit-edit-commit-...-push workflow and that merging, branching, forking and pull-requesting (not to mention cherry-picking, rebasing and other horrors) are not so simple. So I think there is a steep learning curve, but it can be mitigated with new online courses such as the one offered by code school and github.