I'm not saying they did a good job, implementation wise. But isn't it a shame that I have to thank Microsoft for helping out designers instead of the browser standards people?
Well CSS was invented by "browser standards people" to make design easier and more powerful. (Blame browser bugs and incompatibilities for making them more difficult than necessary to use.)
Microsofts inventions (Ajax, drag-drop, contentEditable) were more targeted towards application development than design.
Maybe you're misunderstanding - many of the new CSS3 properties that make life easier for designers implement features that IE has had since IE6 and even earlier. Standards-compliant browser developers are only catching up now.
