I hear the argument that <table>s should only hold tabular data, but (a) that is a convention not a rule and (b) frankly content and layout are so horribly muddled in HTML that I believe in a pragmatic approach with clean, minimal, backwards-compatible code and no fragile hacks. If that means using a couple of layout tables then so be it.

What really grates is that the same people will then often use a <ul> to make a hover menu, which is completely hypocritical.