I've always had a keen interest in distributed architectures, and was pleasantly surprised to discover mercurial when I first started working at rPath. At job-1 we'd been heavy users of perforce, which, while a good solid source control solution, didn't address the very real desire of developers to work "offline" while traveling. Mercurial solves all of this and more in fairly elegant fashion. However, it's something of a mind-bender for many developers for whom the centralized server model has become ingrained.
The biggest conceptual shift to make: realizing that every developer with a mercurial repository for a project has a full branch. If your development practice already encourages developers to have their own "sandbox" branches, as we did with Perforce, then it's actually a whole lot easier to embrace Mercurial.
There's also been quite a few articles posted around the 'net that combine mercurial for offline use with perforce or svn as a centralized hub. I've not tried that (no need at rPath), but I can see the appeal of extending an existing centralized system with mercurial.
Check out this tutorial for a solid starting point on mercurial in general.
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