I agree, but I end up using `pull` anyway just because the alternative is so tedious. I wish there was a short command that did the same thing as pull without fetch: merge the remote-tracking version of the current branch's default upstream into the current branch.

Essentially the whole concept of "upstream" is weird and non-orthogonal. Another one that bothers me is that as far as I can see there's no way to globally turn off setting an upstream on newly created branches (I can pass a flag to the specific "git branch" command, but that's tedious and error-prone).