Yeah, I don't get this hub thing. When I want to manually merge on a Github project I just follow the GH instructions on the PR page to manually checkout the fork, do my work there, and merge it locally then push. Why do you need another tool to do this?
As far as I know hub is more than just a command line tool for pull requests. It extends git with a lot of Github nice-ness. But in the end some people just like CLI's better - and in this case it exposes some features that's not directly available in the UI.
FWIW hub is even handy for the "add a remote for the fork, check out the fork branch" flow, since it lets you just `git remote add ntalbott` instead of having to find or derive the full url for the remote.