Maybe your code isn't famous enough. I've seen lots of x::xs's everywhere, but never a single h::t.
Personally, I always use x::xs in one-liners and something meaningful (no, neither head nor h is meaningful) in longer matches.
I've never mentioned my code as being famous. I've always used h and t in one-liners, maybe because of the person who taught me OCaml.
H and t can also be found in the official Caml and batteries source code, along with hd/tl, a/l and probably x/xs if it pleases you.
I can't agree more about naming variables correctly where it makes sense though.
But I'd like to add that throughout almost all OCaml code I've written and used to read, that type of matching was written:
Wich reads easily `h` for `head` and `t` for `tail`. I'm surprised it hasn't been reproduced in the F# world.`h::t` seems even better to me than `head`/`tail` or `x`/`xs` which for the second one, means nothing really to me.