If you are switching from Subversion to Git and want to know the best way to export your code similar to svn export then here is a great command to know about.

git archive -o ~/Desktop/project.zip HEAD

That will extract your most recent stuff in your current branch, zip it up, and drop it on your desktop. We do a lot of WordPress plugin development and with this single command we can get our plugin code ready for installation extremely quickly. Here is more information about git archive.