It's pretty presumptuous to just tell somebody what they think about English is wrong. We can change the wording without changing the system (Though technically we could even alter the system to update the remote ref as part of the status command, and the wording would be much better to a human! Though we shouldn't, since, as you imply, we don't want the status command to be dependent on a network call.)

Edit: Removed accusation of "Conflating the implementation of the system with the wording of its output".