Setting aside all of the excellent technical and ideological reasons for using semantic CSS based designs for websites, I have noticed another reason to celebrate the proliferation of table-less sites. I see fewer and fewer people trying to work around the limitations of CSS in replicating table-based layouts. Instead they are creating innovative CSS-native designs. Rather than forcing their design into a columnar layout or another old-school format, they are opting for designs which fit the tools to hand.
Rather than replicating print based formats, people are finally, finally, adapting to the web. And it's because of CSS.
http://www.webexpresse.nl/
http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/
http://standblog.org/blog/
Even this blog, and my site:
http://www.happyandlost.co.uk
Keep looking, post examples to the comments. Of course, columns are a great way of layout information, and these designs incorporate them in places. But there's a lot of great ideas sneaking in. Think outside the box (model).