Today I found out just how easy it is to convert an SVN repository to Git without losing any commit history. Note that you will need git-svn (apt-get install git-svn on Debian/Ubuntu).

git svn clone http://mysvnrepo.com/my-project my-project
cd my-project
git remote add origin git@mygitrepo.com:/my-project.git
git push origin master

Et voilà, my-project.git has the full commit history of the my-project SVN repository.

If anybody knows whether SVN branches can be converted to Git branches, please get in touch!