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You are right. HTML is the backbone of the web. It is a semantic markup language. It shouldn't give information about visual presentation.
HTML was designed to work with CSS to provide visually attractive versions of pages. The reason web pages end up with thousands of font tags and stupid nested tables (and code soup) is because people try to use HTML for the look of a page. Which is like trying to paint your house with a breezeblock. Wrong tool for the job.
The "CSS-only crowd", as you put it, are those that use CSS for style and HTML or XHTML for markup. There is no such thing as a "CSS-only" page. Finally, browser compatibility is important. If you do a little researchm you'll most likely find that more "browsers" can successfully use a site properly marked up in HTML and using CSS for style than one that uses nested tables and font tags.
Anyway, to answer the question ... div tags will not hurt your SEO at all. It may even help, especially if you have large pages, as it will allow bots to index more content more quickly.
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