[m3koval]

Why would you not use A* from the beginning? It's a trivial extension to Dijkstras and is often orders of magnitude faster when an informative heuristic is available.

Also, both algorithms require identical data structures. After all, Dijkstras is just A* with a zero heuristic.

I do agree about the constant factor, though: it's likely that a binary heap would be faster on most data sets.