That's not what I'm talking about, and I can and have done that with git using only a single copy of the history of the repository.
I mean that I can make a whole bunch of changes to one file, then tease those changes apart into multiple patches and commit them in the order I want. And if I'm not happy with how things ended up, I can re-order or re-write those patches before I push them upstream. To do the same in a single branch with SVN, I'd have to copy the file, revert it, then manually apply each change one at a time. Hoping that I get everything right the first time.
If I want to run a suite of tests against every patch one at a time, I can script that in a couple of minutes. Or if I notice that something is broken, I can do a binary(-ish) search of everything I've done to find it.
Mastery of git makes almost any workflow possible.