My UV editor has a "Tear off faces" -tool, along with lots of other features. http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/texturing/c/nightshade-uv-editor You select your faces, click a button and those faces are "torn off" and converted to a UV shell selection. Then hit the unfold button, select the shell…
Thanks for the responses guys :) I ran through them all the suggestions this morning at work, testing their functionality on a few objects and characters. I ended up using a combination of your tips, and wrote up a little MEL script which I bound to the "D" key so that the detach function of 3DSMax's UV editor is…