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While getting many things about CSS wrong, Jamie Zawinski's post and the discussion following it make clear that using CSS isn't all nice and dandy. You can't always achieve what you have in mind as cleanly and easily as the prominent CSS advocates want you to believe.
That's not nice and may be due to shortcomings in the design of CSS – I don't know. All I know is that everyone who's using CSS probably wasted a fair amount of the time and joy he gained by seeing 'all those cool looks with so little effort' trying to figure out other quirks when it didn't work as intended right away. I don't think that's a reason to shift into reverse gear. But perhaps to be a little tolerant. Some problems don't seem to have simple or elegant solutions in CSS. I still don't know a way of eliminating the large table in my site without extreme danger of ruining it and basically reproducing a table using divs.
But that doesn't keep me from liking and using real HTML and CSS for everything else with these pages hopefully being rather compliant in spirit and, occasionally, syntax.
The example problem with the heading Jamie gives, reminds me of a question I asked myself. Why do we have the a tag? Why can't every element simply have a href property? The a tag causes trouble. Perhaps you can also tweak that but usually it seems to be an inline element and it's illegal to nest an ordinary heading element inside it by some standard or another. Doing just that is very desirable sometimes as it makes things easier to click. My sidebars of links are examples for that. It's a waste of tags to write <li><a href="xxx">text</a></li> everywhere and nobody would mind being able to click all of the line rather than the text only.