I was reading Phil Haack's blog the other day and noticed he uses the Dvorak keyboard. To make matters even stranger, he uses a standard keyboard and just ignores the labels on the keys. When I was in high school (around 1992 for perspective), I decided to try to learn the Dvorak keyboard. I changed the keyboard in the Windows control panel to Dvorak and then put little labels over all of the keys. The experiment lasted about a week or two before I decided it wasn't worth it.
At the time I believed that the QWERTY keyboard was designed purely to slow the typing speed, which is debatable as the layout more likely was designed to avoid constant sticking of the metal bars on a manual typewriter. The typing speed reduction was, in my opinion, merely a side effect until people became accustomed to the new layout.
Phil states in his post:
The theory behind Dvorak is that the keys are supposed to be arranged in such a way that letters that occur with higher frequency in the English language are on the home row and under stronger fingers. For example, the letter e is under the left middle finger.
The goal is that your fingers would travel less during the course of typing, ideally reducing occurrences of repetitive stress injury, while also increasing typing speed and comfort.
The problem is that I'm not sure that I would type faster if I switched. I mean I type pretty darn fast right now and I don't think switching would result in an overall improvement nor an improvement in comfort. At least that is what I rationalized so long ago after giving up on my Dvorak experiment!