Another thing is important to know about Maven in this relationship, because if you are doing releases via the maven-release-plugin for which you need the SCM information, maven will automatically create SCM Tags for you etc.
Furthermore it’s interesting to know where a project comes from if you are using an artifact in particularly in a commercial environment. (It’s good to produce maven sites for that case).
It’s also possible to do operations via the maven-release-plugin (create a branch) via Maven not via SVN directly.