[mechanical_fish]

Are you thinking of some kind of hybrid system, in which there's a Disqus-like web app to serve recent comments and enable the commenting infrastructure, but the comments eventually (on a timescale of hours) get rendered into static HTML in my git repository for long-term archiving, SEO, searchability, faster page loads, etc?

That sounds interesting.

My next question is: Does Disqus's API let me do this via... Disqus? Surfing through the API docs suggests that the answer may be "yes".

[thedz]

Yup, the API lets you do that. You can pull our your comments and sync to a local datastore.

[thetylerhayes]

Guide: http://docs.disqus.com/help/58 (though it's already automatic in our WordPress and MovableType plugins).