Strip_tags of get_excerpt?

It seems WP’s templates are a bit too inbuilt. It is difficult to extract a value from a DB as it is (e.g., in a Category archive, how do I get a count of the number of posts in that category?)

Anyway, my question, when I do a get_excerpts(), WP automatically wraps the excerpt in <p></p> tags. How can I get it without these paragraph tags to style it on my own (in DL tags).

Thanks!