Shell Programming and Scripting

To save space on our development box, I'd like to manipulate tab-delimited files (many of which are huge) in bzip2 format. For simple things, these commands work:

bunzip2 -c file.tab.bz2 | command | command
bzcat file.tab.bz2 | command | command

However, we do most of our work in Makefiles. So quite often I'll need something like this:

outputFile.tab : file1.tab file2.tab
someCommand $^ > $@

Since "someCommand" expects tab-delimited files, and doesn't accept piped input, it seems that I would need a way to either have a "make" variable which is a link to a shell command or a way to make something similar to a symbolic link in bash which allows me to make a shell variable into an alias for a command (bzcat file.tab.bz2).

Is there any way to do this? Here's what I'd like it to look/work like:

outputFile.tab.bz2 : file1.tab.bz2 file2.tab.bz2
someCommand $^ > $@

Or even:

outputFile.tab.bz2 : file1.tab.bz2
someCommand < $< > $@

Thanks in advance,
Shawn

Is there no way to do this?