I don't think I've ever seen a question as yours, to be honest.
But, it's something I had tested a few months ago, myself - I just hadn't really gone as far as what you are suggesting.
I have a Zune 30, and I pulled the drive awhile back and placed it into a ZIF USB enclosure and booted it up. I've done this for other drives, such as the iPod 5G and Toshiba Gigabeat. In those cases, I could actually view the partition tables and mount them in Linux (I didn't try Windows). But, for the Zune, the partition table is not accessable - I would get an error when trying to view it in gparted or fdisk. I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect it has to do with the proprietary firmware and how it writes to the partition table.
Given that tools like dd will make a bit-by-bit copy of the drive, it's certainly possible that what you are suggesting could work. But unfortunately I've never gone that far in my testing.