My gut reaction to this was negative. As much as I like GitHub, I sympathise a lot with Linus Torvalds' concerns about the way it encourages low-quality pull requests [1].
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.
Why do you sympathize with his concerns? As valid as they are for the kernel they aren't for most of the projects hosted on GitHub. Most people are happy to get a pull request at all, and when they get one it's usually some trivial fix they can merge automatically.
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.
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...