Thank you my man! You made my day!

this did not work at all

In case you still need something like this, I just pieced this together myself:
`git archive --format=tar --remote=[repositoryurl] HEAD:[subdirectory] | tar -xv`

Which will create an archive of a subdirectory of your repository and extract it to the current directory.

Hi Sean, thanks a lot for the snippet! I've tried to do this in the past and also think it's surprising that there's no way to do this with git.