actually it is helpful. I have ran into that in the work place. I just was so focused I was not seeing it. I have actually ran into that in the work environment. where we had a bgp prefix of a customer and we needed to test to see if they could get outside the ISP network. My initial pings did not work because of something similar here where the IP being used by default by the ping was not the correct one and we had to use the source command. So that is vey similar to this except in those cases it was actual public IPs and not loopbacks. However, now that you have pointed it out and its allowed me to step back and see from a further out it makes perfect sense.
Thanks!