Yes, I get a lot of traffic from articles. About 15% of my traffic comes directly from ezinearticles.com and my awstats show a lot of blogs using my articles. I use google alerts to track my articles. so I can see exactly where they're being used.
I use articles in conjunction with other methods I have developed. It depends on how good of a writer you are (or hire) for people to pick it up. But don't rely on just one avenue for traffic.