The only argument that might be important against tables that I could see is that they work less well with screenreaders. Can anyone using a screen reader confirm or deny this? I could easily see it being the other way around, because with tables a screen reader will let you quickly navigate to different parts of the page (e.g. sidebar to header to main content by going left, right, up and down instead of painstakingly navigating over a bunch of text).
On the other hand, tables are easier to use, more flexible, more predictable across browsers, and more readable. Just look at the years and years of research it took the CSS experts at e.g. Alistapart to replicate layouts that are trivial with tables using CSS.
Examples:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxabsolutepositioning/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlayouts/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/negativemargins/
And even then it doesn't always work: http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/hgjump.html
Note that these layouts are utterly trivial to create with tables.
Here's a pretty good summary: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/83073/why-not-use-tables-...