I've been using Vim for something like a decade, and I only recently started toying with hjkl. At first, I ignored it because I was already pretty good with the arrow keys and hjkl are annoyingly not quite the home keys; then I ignored it because I switched to Dvorak and hjkl are scattered across the keyboard.

Strangely, it was Google+ that got me interested in hjkl, or at least J and K for moving up and down. In the Dvorak layout, J and K are where C and V are in QWERTY, so they're still pretty convenient to reach for.