Eh, kinda. CSS requires the assistance of the HTML, though; HTML is "the boss" in the relationship, in that it gets to define where markup boundaries are, declare what CSS classes and identifiers apply to what elements, etc. So "I write the HTML, you lay it out with CSS" isn't really a valid pipelined workflow, if you expect to do anything fancy with your layout.
In GUI desktop-publishing programs, the layout document is "the boss." It's as if CSS could target its rules by byte-slices, rather than needing HTML to hand it ready-made selectors. You can take arbitrary bits and pieces of the linked source, style them how you please, and throw them onto parts of pages as you please.
Consider: in GUI desktop-publishing programs, a "pull quote" is not a second copy of the text in the source. It's just a second reference to the same text-slice of source-text, within the layout.
> Why all this work for a dying medium? Paper is on it's way out.
Layout/typesetting isn't just for books. Posters need layout. Billboards need layout. Business cards need layout. None of these are dying out in the least.
Heck, even for screen media, text within videos (e.g. title cards, ad copy, etc.) has static layout, and so benefits from layout/typesetting.
There will always be a place for tools that allow someone to efficiently describe (or hint) the best way to show text (on a screen, or on a page) for best readability — or best impact.
And even leaving aside the practical uses of text layout, I should note that kinetic typography is also an artform, done for its own sake—and one that often requires the assistance of a layout-constraint engine to achieve it. Do you think you can write something like House of Leaves purely using design tools like Adobe Illustrator? ;)
In a desktop-publishing program, you can just highlight some text in the linked source, and make it bold, and the layout file will remember that that part of that paragraph should now be bold (using a targeting heuristic that will mostly work unless the paragraph is severely changed.)
You can't do that with CSS.
It's an interesting idea, but a counterpoint would be: Why all this work for a dying medium? Paper is on it's way out, and there are so many different screen formats (including E-Inc) that dynamic layout is the way to go.