I certainly use a generic DAO to do all of my data access. Mine is more an entire Persistence Engine rather than a single DAO, but while it may lack in performance it makes up for it in flexibility and ease-of-coding. I never write SQL/deal with ResultSets any more; my engine does that for me.
This frees me from dependency on any one database or application server. This means that I can provide the same code to any application without having to change it to work against MSAccess or Oracle or XML data sources.
Of course I have to provide information to my engine for it to do its work, but I wrote a tool for that
My $.02
Piscis Babelis est parvus, flavus, et hiridicus, et est probabiliter insolitissima raritas in toto mundo.