> but the fact that "hjkl" is not "jkl;" -home keys-
On American keyboards, anyway. That isn't how the keys are laid out on modern Dutch keyboards, though I don't know what they were like when Vim was created.
Vim inherited the keyboard mapping from vi. vi was designed on a QWERTY (American) keyboard, but the particular terminal that the author used had arrows printed on the hjkl keycaps.
More information at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi