Yep.
Rather than having an installation script or Makefile, I've found that a really nice way to add dotfiles is to use an old but lesser-known tool called "stow". (GNU Stow and xstow are both good options, but their syntax differs slightly.)
For example, with GNU Stow:
$ git clone git://github.com/tcreech/dotfiles ~/.dotfiles
$ cd ~/.dotfiles
$ stow --ignore=README.md -nv .
$ stow --ignore=README.md -v .
Done! We now have symlinks to all our dotfiles and dot...directories set up in ~.
The first stow command won't do anything but print out what the second one would do. The second stow command will create symlinks from ~/.dotfiles out into ~, such as ~/.zshrc -> .dotfiles/.zshrc. This way you are warned of any conflicts.
Note that sufficiently old xstow and GNU stow installations may not support "--ignore", while sufficiently new ones will by default ignore README.* files even without --ignore... specified.
The usual stow actions work as expected: to blow away the dotfiles, you can do stow -D ., and to link in new files you've added to ~/.dotfiles you can do stow -R ..