TSV is the clipboard format for tabular data, and it is a genuinely better interchange format than CSV for one reason: the delimiter almost never appears in the values.
Why that matters
CSV needs quoting rules because commas appear in ordinary text, and quoting rules need escaping rules for the quotes themselves. Tabs rarely occur inside a cell, so TSV usually needs no quoting at all — which removes the entire class of parsing bugs that CSV invites.
Where it still breaks
A value containing a literal tab or newline breaks TSV completely, and there is no universally agreed escaping convention to fall back on. Multi-line cells pasted out of a spreadsheet are the common case, and they corrupt the row structure silently.
Empty fields are preserved, if you let them
tr '\t' '\n' converts tabs to newlines but tr -s squeezes repeats, collapsing consecutive tabs into one — which silently drops empty columns and shifts everything after them. Use tr without -s when column positions matter.
Try it: Convert Tab-Separated Text to Lines on SeoWolf's Notepad.