I guarantee for all of my clients that it will look exactly the same, or damn similar (minus font rendering) in IE6 all the way up to the newest versions of Chr

I guarantee for all of my clients that it will look exactly the same, or damn similar (minus font rendering) in IE6 all the way up to the newest versions of Chrome. Once you sit there with IE6, IE8, FF, Safari, and Chrome for a while, you start to get niggles on what each browser will do. For my current client, I've only had to do one IE6 specific hack (fieldset background colors/images). That said, I'm not doing anything too fancy (but still use JQuery, Ajax, etc). Unless we are explicitly leveraging new browser technology, from a design standpoint it could be construed as 'whiny-developer-syndrome' for people who refuse to design for IE. After the initial "WTF" curve with your base css laid out, it's actually not too difficult.