> I use this.on() regularly internally, this is a nice shortcut for "owning" the handle?

That works in some cases, but not if you want to setup a listener on a subnode of this.domNode, and not if the event type you are listening to maps to a function in the widget.   For example, this.on("click", ...) in a dijit/form/Button will setup advice (aspect.after() advice) on the Button.onClick() method, rather than setting up a listener on the widget DOMNode.


>  I think the API documentation for hitch should be updated to explain the difference between using a string of a function parameter

Sure, agreed.   The examples in http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/1.9/dojo/_base/lang.html#dojo-base-lang, and most of the examples in http://dojotoolkit.org/api/1.9/dojo/_base/lang use the string format, but feel free to update it to explain why it's using the string format.