For years we've made do with a boring selection of web safe fonts. When some fancy typography was essential for a design, we've typically substituted a graphical element for it and used a text-indent rule to shift the actual text from the viewport.
There have been a few further options for adding fancy typography to a page. sIFR (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/) and Cufón (http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/) used Flash and JavaScript respectively to re-make text elements appear as the fonts they were intended to be. However, with a responsive design, we want a lean, mean, content-serving machine, and images and code flab should be avoided where possible. Thankfully, CSS provides a means of custom web typography that is now ready for the big time.