However, those deficiencies you mentioned are only "well worth it" because it's our only option. It's this complacent attitude that helped generate a need for a plug-in. HTML and CSS are still tedious to use and often times requires hacks to work in specific browsers. Why? We shouldn't need a mess of frameworks on top of frameworks to fix these "massive deficiencies", it's simply not good enough.
Latest Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome and IE10 - the bunch that supports both HTML5 and CSS3 from the start - are totally painless. That's the "HTML5 nirvana", IMHO. To be honest, breaking the compatibility between these the way the author did is quite an achievement - I really would like to see his code. Probably a quick and simple CSS Reset would solve these issues. Author's mistake is more probable though.
The authors example is terrible, that is an easy layout to do crossbrowser, HTML and CSS do have massive deficiencies in easily creating layouts, but so do most GUI toolkits, and compared to the other factors involved in the success of the web, fiddling around with css a little longer is a price well worth paying, for the majority at least