I've just tracked through a few articles talking about the current state of XHTML 1.0. It strikes me that they all rather miss the point of why XHTML is a buzz phrase right now, and it's nothing to do with semantics or XML. It's because of CSS and accessibility.
CSS layouts are huge right now. Most corporate relaunches are CSS based designs. And for some reason, XHTML has got tied up in this revolution.
And one very useful reason for using XHTML that I rarely see - it's consistant. It forces convention. And that's great in a multi-developer environment. Imagine 20 developers coding in C# without some standard to stick to! And imagine the same with a web site. XHTML provides a strict standard for a team to stick to.