All the time, and 3d as well. socles has a pile of code that uses 2D.
Simplest is probably the sobel filter.
Host code:
http://code.google.com/p/socles/source/browse/trunk/socles/src/au/notzed/socle/filter/Sobel.javaKernel:
http://code.google.com/p/socles/source/browse/trunk/socles/src/au/notzed/socle/filter/sobel.clI don't have any demo code which uses it, but the arguments are pretty obvious.
(note it has a bug and only processes images whose size is a multiple of 16).
Still I find it pretty hard to believe you haven't found any examples with 2d kernels.