Well grids aren't essentially tables. I'm surprised by the comparisons here, it seems like many people have worked with either tables or grids, but not both.

Well grids aren't essentially tables. I'm surprised by the comparisons here, it seems like many people have worked with either tables or grids, but not both. I frequently use both grids and table layouts along-side each other. Tables are especially helpful for creating a horizontal list of elements that are evenly spaced, but of uneven/unknown width. You can't do that with a grid. Since grids are floated, it's easy to adjust the number of elements in a row (by either changing the width or the row or the width of the items). You can't do that with a table, since each row has to be delineated in the markup. I don't use table elements for layout of course, I use display:table. Using a table element for non-tabular data would be unsemantic, unlike using a div which carries no semantics.