Tables are extremely robust. They absolutely lock a set of related blocks in a fixed topographic arrangement and you can use a lot of combinations of sizing methods (fixed, percent, ratio) easily.

here is a great example of tableless CSS biting you on the ass. When I zoomed back one level (ONE level! and clicked in my "news feed" box in Facebook the text field jumps all the way to the bottom of the page. On a smalller screen I might have not even figured out what happened -- it would look like a blank(ish) page.

This doesn't happen with tables! cells can't leap off the page and dosey do.