[tannhaeuser]

Floats are still useful when you want to express structured document flow layouts with illustrations for nearby body text, side-nav link boxes, aligned or otherwise flow-parametered effects such as initials, syndicated/contributed content, or when you just want to float text around images.

[fjp]

Every time I thought I have needed float, I have always later found a cleaner way to do it without float.

[shawnz]

That's probably because float is almost always used for things which it's not designed for. For cases like what the parent described, which float is actually meant for, there is no alternative.

A good example is the floating picture boxes next to paragraphs on Wikipedia. How would you implement such a feature without floats?