> you can use git by itself and send the diffs to each other over email
Why not send it via ssh? It's much easier. And if the data is not too big you don't send diffs but complete file states. Git usually calculates the diffs on the fly by comparing two file states.
I was just giving an example because I think I remember hearing that linux exchanged a lot of their patches over email which is what partly inspired linus to make git the way it is. I'm not really sure of all the different ways you can use it because my teams have always used central repositories.