Much like your post, it all depends where the bottleneck is.
Flashbackup does a raw type backup of the disk which takes out the filesystem bottleneck (the most common one) The drawbacks are that the fulls are full partition backups so they only work well where your filesystem is at least 75% full or so. We have been able to saturate tape drives with this type of backup (20-30MB/s on LTO1) where our normal filesystem backups we can only muster around 10MB/s.
My question would be, what type of throughput are you getting currently, what is the speed of your tape drives, and what is the speed of the network.