I think the fact that SVN adds almost 100 megs of crap to your checkout does suck. But yeah, I don't think it's a deal breaker. I switched to Git for the features; the smaller "checkout" sizes was just an additional benefit.
Thanks for posting your results, I think it's very cool that you are not a Git fan but took the time to really look into it.
git repack -a -d -f --window=100 --depth=100
after converting from svn to git. Otherwise you'll have a lot of artifacts from the conversion lying around and the git repo will be HUGE.
(taken from http://marc.info/?l=git&m=120734745806416)