Who said you have to require scripting to position elements? I most certainly didn't mean to suggest that. That said, CSS is not a programming language, so by nature there are things possible in combination with JavaScript that would not otherwise be possible. I think it's worth considering when attempting to go against the grain of the language, just as it's worth considering changing direction to do something the language is better equipped to deal with.
I've spent many hours tweaking a design with CSS and javascript to replicate what would have been a simple table layout. There are just somethings that CSS isn't good at, for example, it's bad a fluid column layouts. Particularly where you want to have a vertical alignment of a block line up with the bottom of the longest column. (I probably didn't explain that well...) I'm not aware of any CSS that can handle this well w/o javascript.