May 29th 2019, running PyTorch 1.1.0 on Intel® Core™ i7-6920HQ CPU @ 2.90GHz
The difference persists, get ~13x slowdown on ~14,000 length vector:
%%timeit
distances = torch.norm(vertices - point_locs, p=2, dim=1)
3.63 ms ± 43.5 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)

vs
%%timeit
distances = torch.sqrt((vertices - point_locs).pow(2).sum(1))
271 µs ± 5.87 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)