I think the direction is clear: use CSS layouts and fall back to the use of tables if you need to. There is no black and white here. Deciding when and for what purpose you should use tables is the difficult decision, which should be made on a case by case basis. All the pro and cons have their merits, but sometimes simple do not apply.

Take speed for instance, I recently had a nasty experience with a pure CSS menu control (accordeon type, unordered lists) from one of the component vendors. My page hierarchy was a bit large (approx 400 pages). So I used this control and it proved to be extremely slow. Each page refresh took a couple of seconds and in admin mode more than 15 seconds! Of course this was due to the javascript that came with it, and not because of the CSS layout itself. It is just one example in which you think you take the right decision, but end up reverting back to something that works in practice (in this case to Inventua side menu, with which I could realize the same behavior with speed, but is table-based).

Peter

This appears to be an issue with the module not tables vs CSS.

For speed of display, you would be hard presses to find optimized examples where CSS isn't far faster….

1. the page is much, much lighter, (by terabytes)
2. the way browsers render tables will make it appear slower to the visitor (versus progressive rendering),
3. They often require a single image is in multiple fragments, each adding to the request time.
4. with caching the first point also dramatically speeds up the rest of your site,

The speed gap really in the learning curve - and understandably so.  People with rudimentary understanding of CSS routinely make the mistake of thinking it is about logistics.  "Table are a faster, pain free way to show my data."  But the core argument for CSS is actually about data presentation. 

HTML was always intended to be a design neutral language for transferring data.  The tags have meaning, semantic meaning, that helps the viewer understand the nature of the content.  For instance, h1 is meant to convey "first level heading" and that meaning is supposed to be the same on every device.  When you take the tabular data tag TD and make it mean "align right" you break the semantics and create a dialect of HTML.  The longer you keep misusing the tags, the worse the problem will be. Soon you have Ebonics  or another dialect where you need to translate basic words to have all people understand a sentence. 

This is somewhat the case now with IE6 and Firefox et al.   Thankfully, many brilliant people have written the translation dictionaries so you don't have to be fully bi-lingual.

A nice thing about pure CSS is it actually makes programming much, much easier.  You don't have to spend any time worrying about the design: put your content in the appropriate semantic container, allow a designer to move the containers around a little then leave the rest to them.  As CSS is a much easier language to understand the C# so many more people can get the heads around it.  Combine this will the simplicity of the elements and the level of design innovation goes through the roof.