Okay. In this case the whole operation is faster end to end. That includes the time it takes to tar and untar. Maybe those programs do something more efficient in disk access than scp and rsync?

Not useful very often, but fast and kind of cool: You can also just netcat the whole block device if you wanted a full filesystem copy anyway. Optionally zero all empty space before using a tool like zerofree and use on-the-fly compression / decompression with lz4 or lzo. Of course, none of the block devices should be mounted, though you could probably get away with a source that's mounted read-only.

dd is not a magic tool that can deal with block devices while others can't. You can just cp myLinuxInstallDisk.iso to /dev/myUsbDrive, too.