Indeed. You can use it to show the progress of a recursive directory copy with this trick:
tar c -C /tmp/source . | pv | tar x -C /tmp/dest
you can also pass an approximated size of your source to pv, however the tar output will be slightly bigger.
tar c -C /tmp/source . | pv | tar x -C /tmp/dest
you can also pass an approximated size of your source to pv, however the tar output will be slightly bigger.
A bit clumsy, but it shouldn't be hard to write a little script to do it.
Anyway, if cp -R had a progress bar it would behave the same way, i.e. it would have first to recursively stat the source the same way as du does, and only then it could start reporting a completion percentage.