Yeah - especially metals like Fe, Co, and Ni where the conduction electrons are derived from the atom's d-orbitals. The hopping is one of the key elements of the "hubbard" model. This viewpoint doesn't add very much if you want to calculate the conductivity or optical properties, but it is essential for understanding the magnetism of these materials.

What bugged me about this article was that without doing a quantitative analysis of a model and comparing it's predictions to experiments - physical interpretations like whether the electrons are hopping or not are so ambiguous that they are effectively meaningless.