Apparently so... But they don't do some things that tables do... importantly they don't really have a logical relationship to their hierachal siblings, (and sometimes even their parents/children).

Tables are better for certain elements of layouts; and there's certainly no harm in making tabular data attractive... Table's often aren't the most suitable thing for an entire page's layout... But if they are; it's not really a question of what something was or wasn't designed for, it's a question of how well it does what.

Table's have probably been around since before CSS existed.. they have something of a time-honed reliability that DIV's haven't yet acquired.