It changed my mind too. As for only now realising that tables really are the only easy way to do it, I guess partly we've come to accept that the web is broken thanks to IE, so it doesn't stand out as odd that layout is hard with CSS.
Html, in general, is a messy. Html is one of the most amazing programming success stories, in the sense that it is the widely programming language by non-programmers. SIMPLE html created the web. Html that is that was so simple that the friggin w3c standards would never accept it now.
And the "progress of standards" has essentially only made this mircle lousier. You could blame corporations but it really seems like simple bureaucracy was just as much to blame.