Yahoo’s got it
Yahoo’s brand is one to envy, in my opinion. They have really stepped up their design quality in just the past year. Tech.yahoo.com is a great example of that. And while Yahoo’s pages are still a little heavy content-wise, they look and feel good.
We also talk a lot here about how their different brand extensions – yahoo.com, tech.yahoo, finance.yahoo, and even yodel are all different but still pull in the recognizable Yahoo! brand in a way that retains the smaller brands of those sites but still is 100% Yahoo.
And, their sites are css-driven and tableless, tho with a total disregard for validation (yahoo.com has 200 errors!). Still, they certainly have the design edge over Google and Microsoft, at least for now.