Well, they're not necessarily "better", just more syntactically correct. Ultimately they're a little more flexible. But if you're planning on a static row/column layout, I say screw syntax. I think that went a little overboard back when the big layout/presentation split happened. It's honestly still a lot easier to get a multi-column layout to look consistently good cross-browser with tables.* (The W3C people are putting their fingers in their ears going, 'lalala not listening!' when I say that.) Image headers will definitely give you a prettier range (until the standard finally gives us embedded fonts. I mean, geez, it's freakin' 2009. Why not?!? And I'm not talking browser-specific crap either.) I suggest keeping backwards compatibility on them by using a span with the text version of the header in it and a 'display: none;' style applied. Maybe you get blind readers, or maybe you want to revert back to text one day.
*For the record, I don't use tables for flexibility, but if you want quick dev and it's a small site, don't feel pressured into not using them.
Oh, I didn't mean to say he HAD to use DIVs but it's a good practice to at least try to, because of the advantages.
And embedded fonts won't happen any time soon.
Even in the graphics industry, fonts are still a sore spot. Fonts are ridiculously expensive to buy - you will easily pay $200-300 for a font family and most of the times, a font is only used for limited usage like a title. In fact, an article in an industry magazine showed that 90%+ of all fonts used, are used for less than 10 words. Most fonts only occur once or twice in the same magazine (ads, special features, etc.) making it extremely expensive to use a font just a few times due to the price tag.
Now, there's a whole "sharing" community. Basically, companies buy the standard Adobe font pack and the most used fonts and that's it. All the other fonts are given to them by the advertising agencies, the art bureaus, etc. All illegal of course, but it's the only way. To be legal, every printing office would have to buy every single font used in every single ad and that's just not viable.
With an embedded online font, similar issues would appear - the fonts now used are standard ones that come with your OS. The moment a site uses other fonts, they will have to pay for them meaning that font piracy will be a huge problem. Due to the font incompatibility between the OS systems, the huge majority of free fonts won't be sufficient - Macs hate TTF and other PC fonts and visa versa and only OpenType fonts (which are very expensive) would work on both and very few fonts are in the OT format.
And fonts in general always cause headaches - Macs, especially, are TERRIBLE with fonts. The move from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X led to major worldwide headaches due to the poor system used to manage fonts. Heck, even with the standard fonts, you already have issues between different browsers and OS.
