What about the DOT process? Especially for a 1-off copy. This refers to the option of creating (or having SFDC create) a 'DOT' template - this can include or exclude data, and obviously includes the full org meta-data.
We use this process at Veeva - for large deployments across multi countries, we often end up with several 'child' production orgs, cloned from a master org. We use the DOT process for this - no IDE/API calls required, and from the end admin perspective it's generally just down to creating the DOT template, then logging a SFDC case to use this to create a new production org.
Not sure if this is generally available to the whole SFDC community, we are an ISV/OEM partner so might get this through that agreement, but thought I would put this as another option - again, for 1-offs it is a lot simpler than using API/IDE/other tools. Has anyone else used this/seen it used? If not then I'll remove this, but wanted to throw it out there...