Can you make valid Makefiles without tab characters?

Question

target: dependencies
    command1
    command2

On my system (Mac OS X), make seems to require that that Makefiles have a tab character

Answer 1

In vim's insert mode, one can use Ctrl-v to insert a literal tab, even if you have set the tab key to insert spaces. This doesn't answer your question, of course, but might be an alternative to the methods available to avoid needing literal tabs.