No. That is the main point of the article. Pure-CSS layout is only fine if you know the exact dimensions of the text when creating the layout. If the textual content change later you run into problems.
That is why tables fare better in "the real world" even if proof-of-concepts like zen-garden seem to demonstrate that CSS is powerful enough.
In the case of your example, if you truly have a label that resides beside an input box that could hypothetically be as long as a sentence... then you've done more wrong in your content structuring, than you have with your code. :)
As far as your column example is concerned, you made two content areas dependent on each other when that relationship may change overtime too, however with tables... you must recode the entire site structure to adapt to that.
That is why tables fare better in "the real world" even if proof-of-concepts like zen-garden seem to demonstrate that CSS is powerful enough.