now what?...change your mind...tableless is overrated, over-hyped and it under delivers. People are all the time bragging about their tableless designs and yet I see little to no advancement in traditional html methods done right. Google could care less if there is 5 table tags and a few tr's and td's or a the same number of div's, spans and other things. What does care? Broswers. And until microsoft, mozilla, apple and others decide to use the exact same rendering engines, tableless isn't going to be worth the headache. You may become the world's best at table-free design and I guarantee you that you will have more cross browser issues than someone cluelessly using tables embedded in tables embedded in tables and so on.
Now all this being said, there is a great medium to be found. Embedding tables endlessly or using crazy rowspans and colspans is ridiculous in its own right. There's a balance between the two concepts that when achieved, you can get really clean, user-friendly,
seo-friendly code without all the hangups.