We're going to continue spending more and more of our computer time in the browser. It's the universal platform.
What I've wanted for a while is a site where I could fork somebody's muffin recipe, fix stuff and so on ... I've even considered building a site like that, but how many people who cook are also handy enough with a console to make that viable? My guess is not many.
I know I am not the only one but there aren't many
chefs who keep all their recipes in hand-written XML
checked into a Git repository and run XQuery queries
over it for Christmas dinner menu ideas.
Edit: call it gitmeafork.com! (sorry for the bad joke!)
However, thinking back through my own experiences with the kind of minor pull requests I've occasionally made to projects in the past, I can see this being quite useful. Have you ever actually cloned a big repo like the kernel's? Even the Node.js repo takes a fair old while. If you're just trying to submit a correction for a minor typo or omission in the project's README, then this feature lowers the barrier from minutes to seconds. Hopefully that will be a net positive for the community.
[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56599...
Many people who put out open source projects would be glad to get any pull requests at all. Linus has just a very popular open source project and he's got problems we other guys would love to have to worry about.