We can rotate shapes; why not tables too? (Not sure whether the usefulness to difficulty of implementation ratio is high enough to justify this, but it would be nice for Publisher import ... :) )
table rotation is not allowed in LibO 4.3.2.2 and recent 4.4.0.0 daily build. it has always been like that from OOo era.
The use case of tables is to enter data in a structured way. If you want to rotate a table just copy and paste as bitmap. This WORKSFORME perfectly. But feel free to open another ticket if you talk about the missing feature of vertically aligned text within cell (which is also not respected when the table is being copied from Calc). But I'm not sure if ODF supports this feature.