2009/1/21 Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
the default completion in Emacs-23 is very close to partial-completion-mode
 
OMG, so it is!   I've been using partial-completion-mode so long I can't remember why I turned it on.  What's even stupider is that I've never actually used the "partial" feature.  Thanks very much for the enlightenment.