Is there a easy, somewhat painless way to convert the modules of a course into actual courses themselves, other than going through a whole bunch of copy/paste? Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

It's probably easier and more sensible to make them all 'bite size' and so more like individual lesson blocks.
This also makes the contents easier to change in the future and maintaining your module documentation up to date... You do actually plan your work (?) and keep records.
The course would be held together by a structure which is an LMS. One giant module is probably asking for trouble.

I'm not sure about it, but we can use again the module we've created by saving the module as a template. Am I wrong? Tools->Add Module to Templates..
Is this what Josh asked for? [:)]

I've not tried with a content filled set of pages so the answer would be ... it might!