I've seen this quite a bit recently. It's a hack but it's a quick way to get a public-facing issue tracker out there.

Are there any better solutions for getting a tracker set up easily where non-contributors can raise bugs and discuss feature requests?

http://launchpad.net has a bug tracker and a blueprints function.

Can only say one thing about Launchpad, "ew". It has a horrible UI.

One pitfall of open source is that it's sometimes made by people smarter than its users for people smarter than its users.

Care to elaborate a bit on that?

Yeah, the UI is pretty terrible. The only worse UI I can think of is github's.

It's actually a pretty nice idea. Since the wiki and issues tabs are already optional features, perhaps the "Code" tab should be optional too.

Yea, i was a bit interested by that too. Probably already use it internally for other projects, and if they've integrated their internal tools with the GitHub API, it's a no-brainier.