We found it really useful to see, in a way that you could read and ignore, who was committing what to where. It helped you keep up with what was going on, who was working where in the codebase, when things that might impact you changed, etc, all without any explicit effort save for writing decent commit messages.
Particularly when you're all in different timezones, that kind of casual background knowledge is really useful for keeping everyone on the same page. You can scan through the messages to see what's happened in the code overnight in a few minutes.
