Yes, I accidentally was doing that until last month because I messed up my drivers and didn't notice. It's fine. Seriously, I didn't even notice until I happened to open the about dialog in KDE and it cheerfully informed me that we were using llvmpipe. And having since fixed it to actually use the GPU... I can't actually tell the difference now.
...yes it does, when have you last tried daily driving an llvmpipe-rendered desktop?