First, W3C compliance does not mean tableless. Even though it's not 'preffered' I still find myself forced to use tables on some designs just to keep costs down for the client. That may not make much sense right away, I know I fought against it for quite some time but I was finally browbeat by a particualrly complex design that would just...not...work and be consistant across all browsers. I spent many, many, many hours addressing little quirks here and there, setting up multiple stylesheet and still wound up with problems popping up whenever I added a new 3rd party module. Long story short - for a project that was quoted for X hours, I wound up spending 3*X just trying to make the skin 'pure' div/span (mainly to prove a point to a colleague). In the end, we agreed that while it CAN be done, there is more time involved in fully qualifying such a design, especially with evolving 'standards' and browser adoption rates.
From a coder point of view, yes they're more ideal. From a business-for-profit or designer point of view, not worth the hassle at times.
I will say that YAML shows potential, but I have had some minor issues implementing it, as well as the fact that ,to me, a huge bonus of using a DIV/Span layout is its simplicity and lack of extraneous code. Well, most the YAML output has hardly been 'light', but you do need to make some sacrifices for certain functionality.
Finally, let me leave you with a couple links I've come across in relation to this argument:
http://www.giveupandusetables.com/ - My sysadmin forwarded this to me as a joke
http://www.zazzle.com/css_is_awesome_mug-168716435071981928 - Just an awesome mug for the CSS junkies out there.