there’s a useful feature in maya to keep faces together when extruding, extracting, or duplication. in the latest edition of maya (2008) there’s a new global setting to do that for all these tools: edit mesh > keep faces together. quite handy, and you can still turn on/ off this setting per tool in its settings. don’t understimate the usefulness of this setting: it offers you quite interesting results which may be exactly what you need. check out these samples.
maya is huge, everyday i see a new door opening up which opens another doors. now i understand why not even the most experienced maya users tell me that they don’t really know maya even if they create stuff i’d dream of being capable to do.