Personally, I work around this scenario with these steps:
Duplicate track
Mute original track
Delete clip on new track
As long as we're talking about the potential awesomeness of muting things, I'd be a huge fan of being able to mute notes. Ideally, I'd be able to select a few notes and WHACK a handy keybinding. In that world, the notes would still remain but they'd be some different color making it obvious they are muted. Of course, the work-flow I described above works just as well for these experiments but it's a more common scenario I think in terms of quickly messing around with an impromptu idea because we don't always have a particular section defined as a clip. One other detail as to why the "duplicate first" work-flow doesn't lend itself as cleanly to this scenario is the care needed to ensure the duplicated clip is not linked before deleting the target notes. Again, unlinking is quick and easy but it's just a detail not to be overlooked.
Personally, I work around this scenario with these steps:
As long as we're talking about the potential awesomeness of muting things, I'd be a huge fan of being able to mute notes. Ideally, I'd be able to select a few notes and WHACK a handy keybinding. In that world, the notes would still remain but they'd be some different color making it obvious they are muted. Of course, the work-flow I described above works just as well for these experiments but it's a more common scenario I think in terms of quickly messing around with an impromptu idea because we don't always have a particular section defined as a clip. One other detail as to why the "duplicate first" work-flow doesn't lend itself as cleanly to this scenario is the care needed to ensure the duplicated clip is not linked before deleting the target notes. Again, unlinking is quick and easy but it's just a detail not to be overlooked.