git pull merges current branch even when <dst> is specified

If I am in 'master' and 'bugfix' is a remote branch in 'repo' which I do not have locally yet, running:

git pull repo bugfix:bugfix

creates a new local branch 'bugfix' equals to 'repo/bugfix' as expected. However, it also merges 'bugfix' into 'master', that surprises me since I explicitly specify that <dst> is 'bugfix'.

I know that I can get what I want by running:

git fetch repo bugfix:bugfix

But the git-pull behavior looks odd to me. I thought that <dst> was the current branch by default and it could be overridden by specifying it in the command line.

Thank you, Tom