I do this all the time:

  drush up feature_name
  git commit -a

this gives you a nice diff of the config in production v's code.

  drush fd feature_name

sometimes i really need to make a fix in production (or its so trivial the overhead of a release would be just silly), make the change on production, then grab fresh db dump, stick it on dev box and run "drush up". today i did this to remove a link from a field in a view.