You can export the attribute table to a .dbf, while opening the attribute table of the original raster. If that is your desire, then that should not be too bad. The NetCDF format is designed to provide a n dimensional look at the data. So if you had landcover pixels for multiple years then the NetCDF may be the format. That way the lat/lon and multiple values could be listed by date and you could spin through the raster by selecting different values. I am not sure if the NetCDF will allow you to access the original attribute table of the landcover data in the manner you are looking for. For instance, normal NetCDF data is water temperatures that are collected over a time period and usually a depth. So then you can select a particular depth and then scroll through each time period. If you only have a Landcover dataset for one year, I am not sure if that will get what you want, but if you simply want to see the information in the landcover raster in a text format there are other ways. From my limited understanding of Matlab, a text file should work and it does not have to be a NetCDF.