what you learn at home, you can use at work

Very good point. Although at the moment I am so "lucky" as not to have to work...

client availability

This is another very good point. Although it also contributes to confuse me. The point is, up to some time basically there was only CVS, at least speaking of free SCMs. Now there's a flourishing of just so many of them that it's hard to pick up one. Well, not really: it's easy, but one wonders what each and any of them would have to offer him. Having multiple clients to choose amongst is somewhat yet another situation of the same kind.

One thing to note however, is that if you start with cvs, there is a script which allows you to convert to svn. To the best of my knowledge, there is not an automated way of going from svn to cvs.

Oh no, as I explained in my answer to GrandFather's reply, I don't see any advantage in starting with CVS and most probably I won't do so...

From the command line, I have found cvs to be limiting, but fairly straight forward to use whereas svn can be a royal pain.

In which sense? Although I kept forgetting things frequently enough to continuously have to ask coworkers for tips, I remember from my experience with SVN that most operations mimicked common *NIX filesystem managing commands and utilities, thus it was rather easy to use in this sense.

Both have supporting modules in at least perl and java and integrate via plugins with Eclipse and a couple of other IDE's.

Well, interesting to know. But I don't use any IDE anyway. Just a plain old text editor. (However last I checked there was a CVS mode for it, and I bet a SVN one is available too; it's own sources are maintained under Subversion.)