I think it's pretty common. I had two years of it in middle school. It never really stuck though; all my attempts to learn proper home-row style touch typing were a complete wash. After about six or seven years of computer use, I realized that I had absorbed the locations of the keys in my muscle memory, and was able to touch type in spite of not using proper form; as Kaj Sotala says, the bottleneck is thinking about what to type, not typing it.

I'm not sure how many people are equally ill served by the various teaching programs that are available, but I'd be surprised if I'm the only one.