To split, you can duplicate the repo and pull trees out of each dupe in normal commits.
In principle: Yes.
In practice, I can tell you from first-hand experience that this isn't all that simple in bigger, organically grown cases (you'll have many other things to consider if you want to keep the history in a useful way). Especially the broken branching model of SVN and co. is a problem here: In the wild, it immediately leads to "copy&paste branching" (usually through multiple commits. Migrating that to Git or Hg and splitting it up can be a challenge.
If you only need to do this once, subtree will do the job, even retaining all your history if you want.
I'm not sure what the easier way to split big repos is.