It is in principle a violation of the separation between structure and presentation, but it is not a violation of the semantics of HTML which is a bigger issue.

It is in principle a violation of the separation between structure and presentation, but it is not a violation of the semantics of HTML which is a bigger issue. Since div's are semantically neutral in HTML, a multitude of "presentational divs" will not confuse screen readers and so on, as the use of <table>-elements will. That said, separation between structure and presentation is desirable, and the necessity to use multiple divs to achieve a layout effect means CSS 2 is not as powerful as we could want. The grid model in CSS 3 is much more powerful, and allows things like separating the presentation order from the structural order.