copying actual drupal content to a different drupal site
It may be too late for this, but I needed the same thing and came across this thread so thought others might also. There's a new module called Data Export Import which does exactly what you need:


  The purpose of this module is to be able to export nodes, taxonomy
  terms and users to data files and then be able to import these data
  files into Drupal sites. There may be many uses for this module but
  the main one would be that it can provide a way to export data from a
  live Drupal site and then to import that live data into an updated
  version of that site.