I see that as a trade off. Save tape space, but do not get the benefit of the reduction in I/O during Backup Create/Restore, nor the disk-space saving for any on-disk backup copy-files. I would have to be very tight on tape space to make that call 
There was an earlier comment about using the MAX Zip/etc. compression setting in order that the resultant compressed file was as small as possible for transmission. My tests suggested that Max Compression setting (in ZIP) was very slow indeed (i.e. lots of CPU). But ... if server has CPU to spare and size of transmission file is critical, then its a valid call. But a "rare" choice to need to make IMHO.