Lookup vs. HLookup/VLookup - Performance issues

I've used VLookup many times to do some small Numbers magic. The book I learned from suggested avoiding Lookup because there's no way to demand an exact match. That makes sense in some cases, but sometimes you can be pretty confident of a value being in the table. For instance, being given a copy of a value and finding the original in a source table.

So is there any performance reason to use one over the other? Will Lookup run faster/cleaner/better than H/VLookup? Does it depend upon how many displacement rows/columns are being used in H/VLookup?

Thanks,

Vince