@remus said:
...i might just being feeling particularly lazy tonight.
no doubt about you being lazy, remus π€£
what you would like to have sounds pretty much like tha maya workflow. you hit the extrude face command and get this weird handle thing, that lets you rotate, scale and move (relative to the original face, so that moving "up" means "away from the face").
makes only sense if you can push/pull several faces at once. because then you can move/rotate/scale all faces arround their indivitual centres simultanously. so if you selected all the faces of this sphere and extruded, then moved it upward, you would get this funny shape (you can currently do that with normal push/pull).
but with your idea, if you now scaled them down to lets say 0.1, all the spikes would suddenly become pointed. or if you rotated them, they would all twist arround their individual centres - phantastic!
http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/2356/extrudeselectionro7.jpg
I don't know of a way to do that in the current SketchUp version just with one operation.
one great way to implement this into a future SketchUp version would be to right-click on a multiple face selection with the push/pull tool active and select "extrude faces". like that you don't have to introduce another button and the interfaces keeps it's simplicity...