submodules workflow aches

We've been using submodule support for a few months (and I've been checking out the list to see what other people are doing); it works well, but there's a couple of ache points (in the sense that if I'm to convince SVN users to migrate, they're liable to point and laugh).

The first nuisance is the 'get me up to date' stanza of 'git pull && git submodule update' always leaving you on (no branch), even if you were on [master] before, and the head commit now is also equal to [master]. Having to remember to go into several submodules and do 'git checkout master' to get you back to ready-to-do-work mode isn't nice (and is worse if you're on autopilot, and someone has committed a submodule on a different branch

The second nuisance is around conflicts in submodules. If I make a (non-conflicting) change to a submodule, merge with the head and commit, then when I do a 'git pull' in the superproject readiness to do a push, I get a conflict. This is presumably because it doesn't know that the submodule change is a fast-forward. It'd be nice if it could figure that out, and not conflict?

Are people writing their own wrapper scripts for this? I find I have a hard time explaining why it's all necessary to svn users who just (by and large) do 'svn up' and 'svn ci' on projects..