For hits that are in the cache (the usual case) it's obviously faster than going out to the 'net,. The black-holing combined with ad-blockers mean browsing is a lot faster and considerably more peaceful.
In terms of maintenance, it's no real effort other than updating every few years (being behind NAT the security risks aren't huge) and it means the entire household sees the benefit (plus access to webservers/wiki's etc on the .local domain).
Obviously the downside is it needs to be on something that runs 24x7 and a modicum of IT skills are required to set it up. One other catch is that your ISP might block you for not using their DNS; BT (UK ISP) did this, but it is possible to turn off this 'security feature' via a rather obfuscated web page (may have changed since I last did it).