I think it's wonderful. I'd been doing this since the days of Firefox 2.x, using a custom userChrome.css file that hid the back and forward buttons, and combined the stop and reload buttons. But ever since I discovered Vimperator (I've now moved on to Pentadactyl), I've hidden all the chrome buttons, since they're entirely unnecessary.
In my experience, Pentadactyl is more actively developed. The people who started PD were the two most active developers of Vimperator before the fork. PD has since diverged enough from Vimperator that the code bases are almost entirely incompatible.
