Although I'm a really happy cupt user for several weeks now, I have to admit that I didn't read the manpage until a few minutes ago. But after being annoyed by apt-get source again, I thought that chances are good that cupt will help me. And so it was! Now there is a new alias in my zsh config:

alias tget='cupt source --tar-only'

Very useful if you work in teams which keep only the debian directory in their vcs and you need to upload a new revision of a package. Another thing that really rocks is the cupt shell. Give it a try! And don't forget to read cupt(1).