When you are used to the SVN/CVS workflow, it takes a long time to get over it. It took me a long time to understand why the distributed approach is better, despite having read a lot about them.
In my company we are using git as well, but most developers refuse to work anywhere else than on master. They probably had their share of trouble with branching in other systems.
I found the thing that tipped the scales for people who were set in their ways was walking them through a merge and showing that tree conflicts don't exist. And that merging doesn't need to take more than 5 minutes.
I work on a codebase that changes pretty fast, and git has hugely reduced time wasted screwing around with tree conflicts and SVN losing its lunch.