Definitely. At first I made the mistake thinking that tabs were there to help me manage my buffers (and used them for this purpose, remapping :e to :tabe), but it turns out that instead they're just workspaces, which isn't what I actually want most of the time. I use buftabs (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1664) to display the list of open buffers in the status line, and map the right and left arrows to :bnext and :bprev.