I always thought I was a touch typist. With the exception of the number row. I've generally typed at ~60 wpm or so, whenever I cared to take one of those online tests.
For what it's worth, I'm too heavily invested in QWERTY to want to monkey with my layout. I need to be able to comfortably type on issued keyboards as well as my own (or just someone else's machine) and the last thing I want to do is muck myself up.
I'm a programmer, and I began to get more and more irritated with having to break out of my normal typing rhythm to peck at numbers and symbols.
I bought one of those Das boards with the blank caps, thinking I could stubborn my way into the number/symbol row. It's a nice keyboard, and I still use it, but I found it frustrating to bang away with one hand on the number row and one hand on the delete key.
I tried a variety of the free typing tutor programs and was unimpressed (most of them teach basic alpha - no numbers). I finally broke down and bought one of the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing programs. It's pretty cheesy, I grant you, with an interface that hearkens back to somewhere in the mid 90s. There aren't really any games in this one either. But it's not terrible, and it wasn't terribly expensive.
This software has a pretty good assessment feature, and starts you off with an assessment level by default when you first use it. Turns out I was a "touch typist" but I only used my pinkies to hold the shift and control keys :) The only thing I can think of is that I learned to type on a MANUAL typewriter. A very long time ago. Like, when I was a kid. I suspect I just didn't have the strength in my pinkies to hit those keys hard enough...
At any rate, I've stepped through the training, bit by bit, over the last couple of weeks. One of the things that impressed me about this software was that it did teach numbers. No symbols except for the common ones like parens and the hyphen, but still. I've learned how to use my pinkies. I've gained almost 10 wpm so far, and I can type numbers.
If there were a software tutor for programming stuff (like braces and brackets and camel casing) I'd like to try it. For now though, this has been very helpful.
I think, for practice, yes, just typing is plenty good enough. In my case, I really had to buckle down and unlearn some bad habits that I'd developed by "just typing".
Just anecdotes about my own experience. Good luck with yours.