That's not true. One of the products my team has built is a "white-label" syndication system for our content. We built that driven by CSS because it's the only way to drastically change the look and feel without touching the JSPs. We currently have at least 30 or so different looks for the same outputted HTML. As long as you attach classes/IDs everywhere and do it intelligently you can do all sorts of funky overrides (learn selectors!) to change the way the pages render and seriously never touch the HTML.

You can't radically change the flow of the pages but that's not the point.

The other area where CSS driven design makes things easier is debugging or experimenting with the look and feel of the page using Firebug. It's alot easier if all of your positioning and layout is set via IDs and CSS classes because I can go in and modify properties, add properties, etc. without needing to change CSS files or edit the document inline (it's much easier to modify CSS than inline style settings). Tables make this harder to do because tables are a pain in CSS with regard to which elements take specific CSS elements.

I'm not a CSS zealot but once you learn CSS properly (and it seriously doesn't take much time if you just focus on it a bit and find someone good to mentor with a bit) it makes things so much easier, especially if you're using the same generated code across different sites requiring different look and feels.