You are correct. Unlike tools like SVN, Git only stores and uses information locally.
If you want to see the very latest activity that may have been performed on a remote repo you can either:
git fetch
- Remotely browse the repo, if the owner has enabled it.
Running git fetch
regularly may not be a problem depending on you network etc. However, even with SVN, most people don't care about other commits until they themselves are ready to commit so having your repo updated every 60s is probably overkill.
Git users often commit and push their feature branch and so also don't care about other branches until integration time, which might be later and done in a different repo.
You need to make a choice that makes sense for your workflow and setup. However if you are migrating from a centralised model (such as SVN) don't be afraid to let go and try something more "Git'sh" for a time :-)
With regard to remote browsing. Git comes with a subcommand called instaweb git instaweb --help
that will be able to serve repo info via browser