I would prefer to have tortoisejs as few dependencies as possible. It is meant to be simply dropped into people's projects. If they have to add a bunch of dependencies as well, then tortoisejs would no longer be that simple to use.

If there are many places where jQuery would dramatically simplify the code, then I would consider it. But I definitely don't want to add for just a few cases.

In this case, I've added a function that works similar to jQuery's ajax function so this line is clearer.