Pure git directly, no. But a nice GUI system with git (or another VCS) under the hood could work quite well. People in the publishing industry at least already understand the concepts of versioning, diffs and merges, it's just that existing tools are optimized for code, not text.
That's part of it, yes. But code at the end of the day is just text, and at least the github interface is able to do word-by-word diffs. That ought, in the end, to be enough. The other issue is that non-technical people, in my experience, prefer to do their writing using software that does not bounce out VCS-friendly files, eg Word. Also, the terminology of git is somewhat abstruse to the novice.
It's a shame, because I can anecdotally think of one or two occasions where decent version control would have really, really, really helped in managing publications.
It starts with things like fixed-with fonts in the presentation. Great for code, really annoying for long texts. There are enough editors that still do some correction passes on paper, because it works better than spell-checking hundreds of pages on a screen.
I don't think many people are particularly attached to Word, it is just the most common thing that does what they expect.
But similarly, tools would probably need at least some WYSIWYG-features. Like a simplified Word, with more sensible back-end formats and the ability to do diffs and merges also in this mode (similar to the change-tracking features in Word). If it is professionally published, complex layouting is done in different tools like Adobe InDesign anyways, so it doesn't need to be able to do much in the way of that.
