Isn't slower typing speeds a side-effect of this? If you have to move around the keyboard more often (which you do if you want to satisfy the property you gave), isn't it the case that you'll be typing slower than if you didn't have to move around as much?
I bet there's a simple study you could do to see if this is the case. The rough frequency of appearances of characters in English is common knowledge. If you do something to compute the offsets of each key from every other key, then multiply by its frequency and average that, it seems like it'd be a good rough measure of how "efficient" a keyboard layout is.
It may be a side effect, but it wasn't an intention. The idea that it was intended to slow people down is a common myth/misconception/whatever.
And it's sort of hard to test, because I find that I can type words faster when I switch hands every other letter. So when my left hand is hitting one letter, my right hand has the next one queued up. The downside is that it's a lot easier to get letters out of order. 
Oh, that's good to know. Not that I don't believe you, but do you have a source?
Hehe. Well, it might be more beneficial to measure the keys' offset from homerow or something, then. It might also make sense to weight which key on homerow it's closest too, since, for example, pinkies are typically less agile than index fingers.
I can type like 10wpm. But this is on my phone. Stupid thing. Btw wtf is home row?
lol, I bet my sister was up to 30+ WPM on a phone without a qwerty keyboard. She says she sends like 2000 texts a month though, heh.
I'm not sure if that was a serious question, but home row is the "starting place" for your fingers on the keyboard. On qwerty, it's asdf jlk;. On dvorak, it's aoeu dhtn
