Sorry to not share your angelism. git seems worshipped here. I never used it but I used cvs and mercurial a lot, and we are very far from what a real,versioning should be: completely transparent.
cd dir should propose to update it.
save file should commit it and push it in tmp branch.
I do wonder about transparent persistence & versioning - bring on the unlimited undo, independent of editor processes. This would require a better interface for navigating the history than undo/redo or git log. Time Machine is an exploration in this direction.
"Save" can tag a state as interesting.
But please don't conflate "cd" and "update" - I rarely cd (emacs), but I really don't want to grab partial changes from other branches just because I'm working in a directory. Notification that a file has been changed in other commits would be fine, but "a directory" is a poor heuristic for unit-of-change.
I think you might be letting perfect be the enemy of good. Certainly there's a lot of improvement remaining for version control. Ideally everything (files, database records, etc.) should be versioned automatically, but that shouldn't stop us from appreciating the good state we are in today compared to the dark years when version control for anything was difficult or impossible.
Well, I used three version control software: cvs, svn, mercurial. While I agree that the latest is better, I feel it is a bit of an exageration to say that previous to git/mercurial, versioning was difficult or impossible. Many people say git and github are the best invention in the latest years, but I don't see that it had really changed the industry compared to good ol' cvs.
No. That's an online backup of your system. A version control should clearly mark versions you'd ever like to go back to or merge; "save" is not enough for that (many IDEs save every time you compile, and most of the time that's definitely not a version I would like to refer to in the future)
Too much noise/versions is ALSO bad. I'm quite happy with having to tell git every hour or so "this is a version I'd like to go back to"; and continuous zfs snapshots when I want to undo an unplanned delete of the last 20 minutes of work and immediate IDE crash (otherwise, ctrl-z is just as good).
cd dir should propose to update it.
save file should commit it and push it in tmp branch.