Extracting a distributable file tree from git and svn

I would like to get a file tree representing a specific (or latest) tag/branch/label from a repository. Trawling the help files shows me how to manipulate the repository itself, but not to extract the subset that represents just the code. I have done the brute force recursive removal of the .git (or .svn) dirs to get the latest set of files, but there must be a better way.