The cat command can be omitted there, as tee reads from standard input by default, even if stdin points to a terminal. I was going to comment an actually useful (and unavoidable in bash) use of cat and ssh, which is to do do nothing with standard input and redirect it to a file:

  <file ssh 'cat >file'

And you could just use scp, but I've found clients without scp and servers with the SFTP subsystem disabled.