Note: this post assumes Vim, not other implementations of VI
If you type fast, you don't want to have to spend time correcting for line estimations that are slightly off as a result of thinks like 20h. For navigation, just use forward slash to search and you'll land right where you want. It's also almost always faster to use f/F/t/T in conjunction with semicolon or comma for jumping to specific letters than using h or l. The # and * keys are also useful for jumping to words in a specific line. Failing all of /?fFtT#*, it's still going to be faster to use ^0$wWbBeE than hl unless you're one or two characters away from where you want to be. But you shouldn't even need to navigate much within lines, since text objects let you edit entire units of text, regardless of where the cursor is within those units. People who come from an emacs background (and use the default editing environment instead of evil) can't even imagine how powerful Vim is as a raw editor until they try it. I can only edit in emacs for long periods of time if I'm using evil to emulate vim's text objects.
In emacs, we do the same with C-s (search-forward) and C-r (search-backward). It is highly recommended to "jump" to the exact text you want, rather than fiddling around guessing and correcting numerical character and line jumps. Just a bit of support from the dark side!
That's interesting. When I used Emacs with the default bindings, I only used C-s or C-r when I was genuinely trying to search for something, not for navigation. I think I normally used an estimation like C-u 2 0 C-n exactly where I would recommend against doing 20j in Vim. [I meant 20j instead of 20h in this post's grandparent.] This discrepancy probably arose in part because I tend to edit documents as I go in Emacs since there's no mode switching, meaning I didn't usually have to do much jumping around in files, and in part because in Vim I'm used to using the /?nN keys as the motion components of editing commands, not just as isolated motions for navigation, so my fingers are used to jumping to places by searching.
If you type fast, you don't want to have to spend time correcting for line estimations that are slightly off as a result of thinks like 20h. For navigation, just use forward slash to search and you'll land right where you want. It's also almost always faster to use f/F/t/T in conjunction with semicolon or comma for jumping to specific letters than using h or l. The # and * keys are also useful for jumping to words in a specific line. Failing all of /?fFtT#*, it's still going to be faster to use ^0$wWbBeE than hl unless you're one or two characters away from where you want to be. But you shouldn't even need to navigate much within lines, since text objects let you edit entire units of text, regardless of where the cursor is within those units. People who come from an emacs background (and use the default editing environment instead of evil) can't even imagine how powerful Vim is as a raw editor until they try it. I can only edit in emacs for long periods of time if I'm using evil to emulate vim's text objects.
See http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html if you're new to Vim