I don't think any of the current answers really do what you said you want. (Correction: I now see that @Gareth Latty / @Lattyware has incorporated my answer into his own as an "Edit" near the end.)
Anyway, here's my take:
Say these are the tab-separated values in your input file:
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20
then this:
with open("tab-separated-values.txt") as inp:
print( list(zip(*(line.strip().split('\t') for line in inp))) )
would produce the following:
[('1', '6', '11', '16'),
('2', '7', '12', '17'),
('3', '8', '13', '18'),
('4', '9', '14', '19'),
('5', '10', '15', '20')]
As you can see, it put the k-th element of each row into the k-th array.