Can you issue pull requests from the command line on GitHub?
Git now ships with a subcommand 'git request-pull' [-p] <start> <url> [<end>]
You can see the docs here
You may find this useful but it is not exactly the same as GitHub's feature.
UPDATE: The hub command is now an official github project and also supports creating pull requests
ORIGINAL:
Seems like a particularly useful thing to add to the hub command: http://github.com/defunkt/hub or the github gem: http://github.com/defunkt/github-gem
I suggest filing an issue with those projects asking for it. The github guys are pretty responsive.