Magit does give you a surgeon control over the scapel that git is. Most git GUI wants to give you a nice dashboard. The latter is OK if you just want some logs stored (aka git commit and git push), but version control can be a powerful tool especially considering how non linear programming can be.

A patch is an idea, not some snapshot of time. git allows for ideas manipulation. The rebase operation is adjusting ideas to fit a context. And with the reflog (which tracks every operations), you have undo for ideas manipulation.