A pull request on a Git hosting platform is much more though. It allows commenting, tracking versions of the branch, and showing the diff. Even if the pull request is denied, those comments and the diff will stay available for all to see.
You can replicate that with email with a patch-based workflow, if you have a mailing-list server with public archives. That is not that much less software, and you have to deal with email deliverability etc.
Simply sending someone a git-request-pull doesn't carry anything for posterity. It contains a link to some place that hopefully contains the changes at one point (if you typed it right, git does no validation), but probably won't contain them for long.
You can replicate that with email with a patch-based workflow, if you have a mailing-list server with public archives. That is not that much less software, and you have to deal with email deliverability etc.
Simply sending someone a git-request-pull doesn't carry anything for posterity. It contains a link to some place that hopefully contains the changes at one point (if you typed it right, git does no validation), but probably won't contain them for long.