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It's called quantum tunneling. And yes, it is an issue that gets worse as chips decrease in size. Or more precisely, as the insulator walls become thinner, it becomes increasingly likely that the electrons passing through the conduit will literally jump from inside the pathway to outside of it, even though there is a physical barrier in place. That's why the last few generations of cpus had considerable heat and power consumption issues(most notably the P4 Prescott cores). The electrons inside the chip basically leak out causing heat and requiring more energy to replace those lost electrons.
And we aren't heading towards using invidual electrons as bits. Not in traditional Turing computers at any rate. In quantum computing, the atom as a whole is used as an information medium, not just the electron. In theory, fundamental aspects of each atom such as its spin can be used to convey information, although all the details have yet to be worked out.
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