It does, although you then only have the IP inside of that node's run, and not on the others. We're using this for two purposes: First, to automate connecting to the server to use chef-solo (we don't need to keep track of IPs, they are stored in the node file). Second, to use other servers IP addresses inside a recipe (say, I want my web server to connect to the DB server on it's IP, so it loads the IP from the node file using a search).