Yes and no, at least for me, I have the option of printing whitespace chars as some printable ones (tabs vs spaces). Copying via tmux or the terminal emulator also pick them up, while yanking them on vim does not. Also I'm already too comfortable on vim yank keybindings, the combo yank with movements are very powerful
It works in xfce4-terminal too, so I guess it's something from the VTE Terminal Widget Library [1].