I wouldn’t really recommend SVN for any team, I’d go with hg for a team of beginners, and git for a team of experienced developers. A team that have never used any version control before would benefit more from hg, and the added bonus of easy merges, cost-free branches, and that they don’t have to be online to use the system. They also don’t have to unlearn anything, unlike someone who switches from a centralized to a non-centralized VCS.

It’s a great read, I think the sales pitch is very nice. I have a similar blog post where I wrote about how I introduced hg to a small dev team, if anyone’s interested: http://ihaveabackup.net/2011/12/04/introducing-mercurial-to-a-small-development-team/