One pedantic point [what, here on HN??!!] about your statement "layout divs and lists also aren't semantic"... the difference is that divs are never semantic, and they're not supposed to be. Whereas table are semantic and impart meaning on what the kind of content is. So, yeah, divs aren't semantic and that's exactly why they're more appropriate than tables for layout.
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.
