Apologies, for dropping in between, but as per my knowledge pure/native JS runs faster than the jQuery.

I've ran few test cases for dom element selection, event binding and even for event bubbling, and found out native JS was a pure winner. You can feel the real difference while running the website/web app on a mobile device, as due to the hardware restriction mobile device really shows you the efficiency of the code. Few test cases can be found over here

http://jsperf.com/jquery-vs-js1
http://jsperf.com/jquery-vs-javascript-performance-comparison/14

So, it'd be better if someone feels that porting the code to jquery is not going to hamper the performance, then only the porting task should be started.