I think he means why not get rid of IE all together? 7 & 8 are more standards compliant than 6 (which isn't saying much), but they still are lagging behind Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.
Depends what you mean by 'standards'. 7 & 8 support more of CSS 2.1 than the other browsers.
I believe support for CSS3 is lacking because they didn't want to write to a draft, and then have to support no-longer-standard extensions when the draft changed.
