Nope. You can just get the tunderbird release and extract it. It will create a thunderbird folder with a thunderbird executable file inside it among other files. You can put this thunderbird folder anywhere in your file system and execute thunderbird inside it from command line. That simple! :) You can create a link in your desktop to this file too. It used to have icons in the distributed tar.gz, but now I can't find them anymore. I'm using another icon I found for thunderbird.
Icons (thunderbird 0.7.1): <your_thunderbird_home>/thunderbird/chrome/icons/default/
Cheers, Bill