It's not so much as failing of CSS as a technology as it is an indication that CSS is not the language designers want it to be.

What really sucks is that it's actually pretty close to that language. Everything's fine until you hit the cross-browser compability issues or realize it's missing a few primitives (like the ability to easily create columns). Then you want to tear your hair out. And/or resort to hacks.

Exactly. I think CSS started out as more of a typesetting layout, and has been stretched into this other beast.

To me, it doesn't make much sense to spend many hours of cursing and headaches trying to force CSS to do something that a very basic HTML table can do in just a few seconds.

I dunno, CSS doesn't really provide much to help you scale a layout. Scaling using percentage widths is about as rudimentary as it gets.

What about ems?

When I say "percentage based scaling", I mean "simply resizing elements to fill the screen". That's what's rudimentary.

A nice scaling toolkit would let you intelligently use all that width. You might be able to change how things flow, change how much content shows in various elements, etc, etc. Making wider columns usually sucks.

I believe css3 adds support for better tables. Although when IE might decide to add that is anyones guess.

I believe IE8 beta has support for display:table* properties.