I want to know if there\'s a way to turn off the default push, but keep the default pull when using Mercurial. I don\'t want to accidentally pollute the master repository b
Your solution probably is the quickest and is certainly effective. If there's any official way it would be using a preoutgoing hook:
[hooks]
preoutgoing = bash -c 'read -p "Really push to $HG_URL? " -n 1 RESP ; [ "$RESP" == "y" ]'
which will ask you if you want to push and provide the URL to which it would go as a reminder.