While I've never dealt with pull requests myself, I can understand the annoyance if lots of remotes are added to a repo just because a pull request was accepted from a contributor at some time in the past. I'd have to agree with the poster that patches are a cleaner way to contribute to a project and it's a shame Github hasn't some functionality built in to just send a patch to a maintainer instead of using pull requests.

It can be circumvented using coral: http://laurent.bachelier.name.nyud.net/2012/05/github-kinda-...