I have specifically and manually removed the fake split commits after importing from SVN, because they didn't add information AFAICS. Why would you want them in the repository?
They add the information about when the changes to the repository done at the split were made. In the current git repository, those changes seem to be erroneously reported as part of a completely unrelated commit several days later. (The exact date isn't all that important, but I don't want totally unrelated changes grouped together as a single commit.)
Git branches can be demoted to tags at the flip of a switch at anytime, and that probably is what we should be doing. I.e. in git, after the 7.8/7.9 split, I'll be changing the 7.7 branch to become a tag, and then copy that tag into 2 branches, 7.8 and 7.9. Whereas "master" is then pointing to 7.9, but that is just convention in git, and doesn't have a lot of realworld implications.
Well, that makes sense I guess. Btw, what is the difference (implied by the convention) between "master" and "HEAD"?