Patrick Griffiths points out a few flaws with those thinking that tables are easier for layout than Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), in his entry, Tables My Ass.
One myth is that CSS is ‘hard’. It isn’t hard. Well, not any more difficult than any other approach. The problem is that experienced web designers started out by using tables for layout and then had to completely change their approach to do things the CSS way.
In the comments following this piece is a nice resource for form layout, which shows tables may not be necessary when designing forms.
Cameron Adams, offers up his Accessible, stylish form layout (24 March 2004) which includes a link to Form Layout Templates an experiment and tool to show how forms can be manipulated into columns and orientations with CSS. Comments following the entry offer additional resources well worth checking.