Without having read the article, I would say that the point of a heat pump isn't to save money.
Most detached single family homes in this country rely on centrally ducted gas furnaces for heating and separate air conditioning for cooling. Burning fossil fuels for heat directly on site is cheap and effective, but ultimately unsustainable.
Heat pumps solve this by being ridiculously efficient in the right conditions. Instead of converting fuel to heat by burning it, a heat pump simply takes the heat energy stored in the air (or ground) outside and relocates it inside. Moving heat energy is a lot easier than converting it, so a heat pump is able to be something like 300% efficient. For every watt of electricity needed to power the pump, it is able to move 3 or 4 watts of heat into your home.
Funnily enough, your run-of-the-mill air conditioner already does this, just in reverse. It pulls the heat energy out of the air in your home and ejects it outside. A heat pump can fill both roles by being reversible.
Unfortunately many of us live in a climate that sees temperatures fall below -20° for most of the winter which leaves very little available heat in the air, so heat pump efficiency during these times is lackluster and the unit may need to run constantly just to keep up. Therefore a backup heat source like baseboard or furnace heating is usually still required for winter, though advances in heat pump technology are making this less of a problem.