At some point the SCM vendor (decided|was forced) to declare he would no longer provide the system for free.
You left out an important (to me) fact here: This was triggered because a member of Linus' team that was gung-ho "everything in the world should be open-source" guy wrote a
reverse-engineering of the data format for BitKeeper, violating the agreement Linus had with Larry, even over Linus' persistent and deliberate advice to the contrary.
So, part of the story is "even if you're an open-source zealot, follow the rules!"
On the other hand, from lemons came lemonade. I'm strongly considering using Git on projects because of its nice distributed creativity model. (No, I can't seem to get SVK to work on my machines, and the rest of the stuff looks even further down the scale. Git compiles and installs trivially, except for the documentation stuff.)
update: yes, sorry, I misheard the story. Not a "member of his team", but perhaps someone who should have understood the consequences of his act.