I originally started off using Dreamweaver 2, then followed up with v3 and then MX on various school machines. After I started getting more into standards compliant code and things working in more compliant browsers I have dumped Dreamweaver, tried GoLive for a short while, it was nice for CSS but that was about it. I now code my sites in a syntax highlighting text editor. I have used HTML-Kit, Scintilla, Maguma PHP Studio, Zend Studio (my current main one, cept having problems with it on OSX). Now in OSX I have tried things like BBEdit and SubEthaEdit, I finally settled on SubEthaEdit and bought a proper license as I do paid work in it. Its one of the best editors I have used, very nice and responsive. It still gets lost with PHP heredoc, but Zend is the only one not to that I know of.
Anyway, after that long history of my coding applications, no I have never used notepad to code, at least not for long periods of time. Never really hated myself that much. The reason why a lot of people say to learn in notepad is that they think its important to learn how the code/markup goes together so that if you use something like Dreamweaver later on you can duck into the code and fix things that Dreamweaver has done. I do believe this is important, but why make the learning process harder on yourself, get a syntax highlighting editor so that you can see and visualise your code better, it helps you catch errors as well.
A final thing to remember is that applications like Dreamweaver in order to show you physical preview of what you are creating in realtime they have to use a rendering engine. Dreamweaver still uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer rendering engine, so everything that MSIE cant do DWMX also cannot do, like transparent 24-bit PNG files, certain types of CSS selectors especially and certain other aspects of the CSS specification.
This does mean that you can design a site that will work in MSIE, but you cant guarantee that it will work in other browsers. I wrote one of the previous versions of my geffychan website in Dreamweaver, in MSIE it looked great, but in other browsers certain things just didnt work properly and it took me ages to properly debug it to the point that both MSIE and other browsers could render it properly. So in that respect a wysiwyg editor can actually increase your work load, and you just know that some of us here can get bitchy if things arent all valid
So to conclude your arguement is valid, you should learn on something like notepad, learn it in the text format and then go to a wysiwyg editor, but thats not to say you shouldnt use some form of HTML Text Editor like the ones mentioned above.