The big take away for me was the idea of blobs and trees as Hickeyian values and commits as Von Neumann places. [1] If there is one weakness is the article it is ending with stash, which to me seems to be a bit of a feature in search of a workflow more than something that enhances distribution and sharing among a team in so far as the class of problem it addresses seems to result from larger issues of team structure and workflow [if it's worth saving then the whole team should know about it and have access].
It's useful to know about, but placing it at the end makes it seem like a high order bit rather than something for a corner case.
I find stash useful primarily as a place to hold things for a few minutes, and no longer. In particular, I frequently use "git stash", followed by "git pull --rebase", and if all went well, "git stash pop". I could just as easily do "git commit -a -m 'WIP'", "git pull --rebase", and "git reset HEAD^", but I find stash more intuitive.
That sort of gets at my point, stash makes sense in a corner of a high disciplined workflow. But the article presents it as approaching "best practice" and as a belt to sport with one's lederhosen. By analogy it's a bit like multiple inheritance in C++, on occasion and for some people it might be just the thing, but it's probably not a good starting assumption at the design phase.
Though again, it's a minor criticism and mostly related to the impression of importance positioning it at the end of the article suggests [i.e. placing the strongest point in paragraph four of the five paragraph essay].
I suppose I was thinking more in terms of idempotency than persistence. N Shakespearean monkeys type:
$> echo "A rose" > any_other_name
$> git init
$> git commit -a -m "Initial Commit"
There's one blob hash, one tree hash, and M commit hashes where M is the size of the set of the tuples of email addresses and author names among the monkeys.
It's useful to know about, but placing it at the end makes it seem like a high order bit rather than something for a corner case.
[1]: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values