Even if I concede that it's a damn fine start, it is not research sufficient to jump to the conclusion that (a) CSS layouts are overcompensating (based on a "hypothesis" taken out of thin air) and (b) people who believe using tables for layouts is bad are wrong based on said research.
Edit: He also managed to not even properly conduct this simplistic research considering that many of the tables used on the sites were used correctly, e.g. for tabular data.
Yes. Yes, it does count as research. When you see people who have done what you want to do, looking at how they did it is likely to guide you in how you should do it. That doesn't always work, but it's a damn fine start.