Today at 07:47 PM Xenon said this in Post #6 there's addslashed in gettemplate, just if you don't want em in you can call gettemplate in another way..
After actually installing vBulletin and examining the database rows it was pulling template data from, everything became clear. As a Smarty user, I must say I still find the eval() template system odd. I'm likely going to be hacking the codebase to use Smarty and Pear DB before deploying it on my site.