You can't even use call or check_call without referencing the Popen constructor documentation, so I'm not sure what you are advocating, Anatoly.  We certainly don't want to repeat the Popen documentation in full for each convenience function, and if we aren't doing that it seems to me that the current one line redirect to the full Popen docs is the right thing to do.  I have, however, turned those references into active links. so that all you have to do is click on Popen to get bounced up to the full docs.  (Change made in trunk in r78206, it will get copied to the other branches eventually.)