Well, I don’t see how misinformation helps to be informative... ;-)
It’s not misinformation, it’s just marginalization to a summary, a process that loses some information.
They actually should use ‘transitional state’ to be more precise, but the actual physicists themselves use ‘tunneling state’ as in their journal paper written for the esteemed Physical Review Letters:
“Quantum Tunneling of Water in Beryl: A New State of the Water Molecule”
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.167802
In the paper they mention quantum motion which parallels an action as you suggest:
-—“At low temperatures, this tunneling water exhibits quantum motion through the separating potential walls, which is forbidden in the classical world,” said Dr. Alexander Kolesnikov of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, lead author on the paper.-—
Not to belabor the distinctions, I think as other physicists have written that the tunneling may be better characterized as a ‘transitional state’.
It is important to note however that the gems mentioned, emerald, sapphire, have color properties that are in effect a state established by the tunneling, like trapping an immortal bee in a bottle. The distinction I think may not be so important as it first appears.