Unable to clone empty repositories remotely

Greetings,

mkdir test cd test git init --bare --shared=group cd .. git clone test test2

works, though clone says it cannot checkout, which is expected. This is nevertheless very useful when you create a shared repository for a new project; you can then create a personal clone and start adding stuff to it. If, however, you normally work on another machine and want to have your personal clone there (i.e. git clone ssh://therepomachine/somewhere/test), cloning doesn't work at all (tested with git 1.6.0.3.525.ge32c2 in Cygwin):

Initialized empty Git repository in /cygdrive/c/temp/test/.git/ fatal: no matching remote head

This behaviour isn't documented by either git-init(1) or git-clone(1). I think it would be very convenient if this worked for the reasons mentioned above. I'm sure you could create your personal repository with git init and then git remote add the shared repository to it but that's much more difficult.