That depends on what you're optimizing for. If you care about making your code smaller (which reduces the occurrence of bugs), making it more readable, etc., and performance isn't much of an issue, then it probably is a win. If you care about getting maximum performance... well, then, you need to get a good knowledge of the target system's performance characteristics and how language features are implemented in order to decide if it's a win or not (or, y'know, just profile the two options, I guess); it's entirely possible that a string of pointer dereferences might turn out to actually be faster than a conditional branch anyway.
> If you care about making your code smaller (which reduces the occurrence of bugs), making it more readable, etc., and performance isn't much of an issue, then it probably is a win.
Maintainability over the life of the code is more important than optimizing its present state to the most elegant solution. The code is going to grow, requirements will change, cases will be added not present in the current system.
