Tables still have a place in CSS based layouts. Forms is a great example. On a recent project, i coded out a template for forms using all CSS, and it took a while to get everything right. Problem is, I was handing the template off to our programmer to duplicate into other forms, some of which had different content. So in the end, I spent even more time trying to show him how I did everything using CSS when just using a table would have saved us both a huge amount of time.
When it comes to layout, web designers have traditionally taken advantage of HTML Tables to place content and navigation into a particular arrangement of rows and columns. Eventually, the demand for more flexibility over presentational control of Web content led to CSS being introduced as a standard for controlling style and layout. For a long time however, everyone except extreme CSS purists could see that until browser support for CSS was sufficiently high, using it over traditional solutions such as HTML Tables would in fact reduce accessibility and usability for most users, given the unexpected and often catastrophic effect of CSS-controlled layout on older, but still popular, 'Version 4' browsers.
Speaking of tables for layout I think that tables are not bad, but if you can get away with css do it first. They say that tables take more time to download - I don't remmeber seeing any complains about it, and I didn't have any issues with the speed of table load. What is exactly wrong with table? Is it tr, td, table tags? I don't think that is it. The only thing I would be against is nesting tables. Creating table witihin a table for placing a pic... is BAD poor design, even table cells for single item is POOR solution. Don't forget if you have tabular data USE table, the word "tabular" stands for table - you don't have to be an experienced web designer to understand with what tag tabular data gets wrapped. I also have nothing against font tag it is just one more inline tag like span tag that you can asign id or class to in case if you have ran-out of span tags :). Good idea?