I used to do it most of the time during the summer, living 2 miles away from my workplace. (Now I work from home, so "going to work" means rolling out of bed and grabbing a laptop, modulo getting the kid ready for daycare.) I'd highly recommend it - aside from getting exercise & outdoor time, feeling refreshed each time you get into work, avoiding all the rush-hour traffic (in my area, getting over the Shoreline/101 bridge in a car could take as long as the entire bike ride in), and not needing to find parking, you also feel like you're doing something good for the environment, and my workplace had a program where they donated to charity every time you biked/walked/scootered/rollerbladed in.

Like many other "nice to have" things, it's a matter of making it a priority. I'd had an hour commute when I worked in downtown Boston, and when I moved out to Silicon Valley, I told the realtor that was showing me around "No more than 15 minutes away from work." He was like "15 minutes? That means Mountain View, Palo Alto, or some parts of Sunnyvale. It'll cost you a lot." I said "I'm prepared to pay."

Would be nice if cities were built in a way that not just a select few high-earners could walk or bike to work, though. Right now, every person that moves into bike commuting distance of the major employers tends to displace someone who needs to move further away (oftentimes much further away); only way to avoid that is with more density.