This is how Pull from Upstream looks in NetBeans (after pressing Search History link):
As you said it is doing fetch + merge. At first i thought only green ones are actually applied to the master.
I think i have found all the equivalents of git commands that i will need for my workflow of testing patches. Pull, create/checkout branch, apply diff patch, clean build, switch to master, delete branch. Though actually for creating a branch it uses another command:
git branch --track test_patch master
Which i found is the same as the -b switch (which combines two commands into one).
Now i have to wait for some new patches to actually try this process out. Tomas Hruska said he will have more patches for Spark this week maybe.