Native equals "not requiring some weird emulation layer", and it matters because of performance, maintainability and quality.

Got any quantifiable data that shows Git suffers performance-wise on Windows? No?

MinGW (unlike Cygwin) is not an emulation layer, any less than libc is. If you're operating by that level of pedantry, you'd be hard pressed to find any "native" Windows software, since pretty much everything depends on the Win32 API, which isn't native.

The mind boggles at the doublethink required for you to be able to call Python "native".

*Deletes long post about the roles of MinGW and MSYS, the position of Python, what constitutes emulation layers, how Git has pretty much caught up with Mercurial on Windows support*

Damn you, f0dder, beat me to it .

I was thinking the opposite... thank you for arguing it so I wouldn't have to!