CSS can be a pain to work with due to the compatibility issues, but once you know what you're doing it's a great tool and tables really should not be used for layout purposes.
I also believe there IS search engine benefit, as when the spider has less html clutter to go through it is able to read more of your page content and thus find a better keyword density and content-to-html ratio. Just make sure your css is linked to not included in the page or you defeat the whole idea there
