Same thing with bunny hopping in Quake, Half-Life and subsequently Counter-Strike. For an even deeper cut there are at least for older CS-games a sub-genre of surf maps specifically about navigating large areas with lots of pitfalls through that feature (previously bug).
Indeed they did try that with a patch, but it had unintended consequences with "regular" movement feeling clunky, so they reverted it. It seems bunny hopping is a tightly linked side-effect of the set of physics rules that make those games "feel" good.
