styling checkboxes

So, this should get you closer. It hacks around the poor form styles in your theme and should override those for your Gravity Forms. Add these to the end of your theme stylesheet.

[css]
#content .gform_wrapper li {
    margin-left: 0;
}

body .gform_wrapper ul,
body .gform_wrapper li {
	max-width:1000px!important
}

#content .gform_wrapper input[type=checkbox],
#content .gform_wrapper input[type=radio],
#content .gform_wrapper input[type=submit],
#content .gform_wrapper input[type=button] {
    width: auto!important;
}

#content .gform_wrapper input,
#content .gform_wrapper textarea {
	margin-right:0!important
}

screenshot: http://bit.ly/o6Aqtc

You can tweak everything from there until you like it.

Sure, your theme has a contact form that looks nice and the CSS for that form would have to be included, that's not what I was saying. I'm saying that the way the CSS was written was very specific to that one form but was written in a way that ANY form on the site would inherit from that.

There are some CSS/styling specific resources available in the documentation. You can have "total control" over the look of the forms by targeting the elements and styling them with your own CSS.

http://www.gravityhelp.com/documentation/page/CSS_Targeting_Samples
http://www.gravityhelp.com/resources/cssguide/css_guide.html

Gravity Forms isn't "totally reliant" on the theme styles. That's incorrect. Take a look at the form preview page. The forms have nice, basic formatting and function perfectly there without any styles included from the theme.

There is no WordPress-specific ideology at work in the styling or formatting. The fact is that the forms become part of the page (as opposed to framed in like Wufoo, etc) so they're going to inherit styles from the parent theme just like any other elements in the page. The forms are actually designed to inherit styles from the parent so they can blend in with the rest of the theme without a lot of effort.

There's no bulletproof way to create "theme independent pre-set CSS layouts" that won't inherit properties from the parent. We are planning on offering some type of theming/advanced styling add-on in the future to make it a bit easier though for folks with limited CSS skils.

In the mean time, we'll still be happy to help you if you have styling issues that you can't resolve.

Lastly, we have a full working demo of the plugin available so there's no reason to be surprised by the functionality or any limitations of the plugin after your purchase. You could have tried that out, asked us questions pre-sale, etc. We do our best to educate folks pre-sale if they want to take advantage of those resources.