At first I thought this would be the "ssh-tar-pipe-tar" trick, and I was all set to recommend using rsync with ssh, to copy files to/from a remote systems. However David did come up with a use case I hadn't thought of, namely creating a local tarball from files on a remote system.
I'll also give him bonus points for explaining the use of redirection in an ssh command. That's something that has confused several beginners, and he covered it well.
Very interesting article. Thanks for letting us know what you tried and what worked!