Interesting, I've used svn for about four years and have never "lost" anything I've changed in my working copy. I've certainly had some cases of merge conflicts that were tedious to resolve, but my changes were all "there". And if you're working in a branch and commit to your branch before you try to merge back into trunk, you can always get everything back if something goes awry.

I'm not saying git doesn't handle this better; I have not tried it yet myself. But in my experience it's possible to use svn without risk of losing your changes.