Yes, if the tableView is your main view. Otherwise you are left rolling your own solution. In the case of the iPad, the tableView is rarely my main view for my controller, so I needed a little more flexible solution.
Also it would be quite a bit of overkill and extra communication and code to back every table with a full blown view controller.
The reasoning here was that search results aren't going to come up that often, so we wanted the results out of the way most of the time to make a cleaner interface.