The Mercurial fetch extension adds the hg fetch command. I’ve heard hg fetch described as “a great Do What I Mean kind of command.” It isn’t enabled by default, but it saves enough steps in the frequently-used push/pull-merge-commit cycle so many people turn it on when they set up Mercurial.
It seems as if the fetch extension is an open secret in the Hg community, but it took me some time to come across it so I thought I’d help raise its visibility. At least when I’m Googling my own site to remember something I’ve forgotten later.