As a precaution, using system.tag.getConfiguration on UDTInstance tags will get all of the non-default configuration of the tag which includes both the overridden properties applied to the UDT instance as well as the UDT definition's configuration. Therefore, if you use getConfiguration and configure, you will essentially apply overrides for all of its tags' configuration which is not generally what you want...
This was the reason for my request for @PGriffith to add system.tag.getLocalConfiguration to his extension module