equivalent in node: http://github.com/mikeal/request
equivalent in jquery: https://github.com/iriscouch/request_jquery
Python's urllib2 isn't that bad for the simple stuff shown in your links, but it's a mess when you have to try to log in somewhere. Seeing in the example that logging in is as straightforward as
requests.get('https://api.github.com', auth=('user', 'pass'))