There are situations when a table based layout just works better. Have you ever designed a site that needs to work with right-to-left text (Arabic / Hebrew) as well as English? If you use tables for your layout a simple 'html {direction:rtl}' fixes everything. If you are doing it the "right" way then you have to reverse every float and margin settings from right to left and vice versa. A nightmare to maintain. Clearly the CSS designers did not have that use case in mind.