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The problem is semantic, and it also makes the page less accessible. The general viewer probably can't tell the difference, but it's just something that isn't a good idea, and it will probably stop validating in a future version of XHTML. Yeah, non-table layouts may be harder, but once all the major browsers have the table-display CSS support it should become just as easy.

Yes and No to the author's observations…

Personally, i prefer to pick my battles. I consider semantic markup to be the best approach, because of all the reasons you know…

But, when it comes to implementation, if i am pressed for time, i try to do it semantically right first, if it doesn’t work in a couple of attempts, i switch to *get it working* mode and get the required result. Once i have it working, and i still have time to spare, i will try to make it semantically correct again.

This way, you will have semantic markup with only the necessary hooks if it works in the first couple of attempts. So, my take is not to revert to table-based to start with, but fall-back if there is no simple solution.