Semantics is all fine and dandy, but at the end of the day the question is, how much time and effort are you going to invest into it, and how much time and effort do you expect your users to invest into it. Of course there are redundant uses of tables, but to restrict it to strictly tabular data only is to cater for a heck of a lot of extra work and complications for everyone who tries to modify things from the expert CSS work that works cross-browser in a particular setup.

Tables in select places see more are often the only reasonable way you can go with certain positioning issues if you want to be cross-browser compatible backward to older versions of IE, and not have to do separate style sheets for the said browsers. I'm all for no tables and semantic absolutism, but unfortunately the CSS support in certain browsers with large enough a market share just isn't quite up to notch yet.

If it's simplicity versus semantics, I choose simplicity. When the browsers' market share changes, and when semantics and simplicity go hand in hand, the call is a no-brainer. Until then, it's not as black and white as many would love to have it, and I am personally not interested in having my users to have to deal with hordes well-documented quirks, if there's a clear and straight-forward proven solution that everyone is familiar with, and that doesn't involve battling with quirks.