Testing Javascript that Manipulates the DOM

I've been looking into javascript test suites and I have found QUnit to be very interesting. I understand how to test computational code, but...

How do you test javascript applications written primarily for DOM manipulation?

it seems like testing the position/color/etc of DOM elements would be a moot point because you'd end up doing somethign like this:

$("li.my_element").css("background-color", "#f00");

and then in your test...

$(function() {
    module("coloring");
    test("test_my_element", function() {
        var li_element_color = $("li.my_element").css('background-color');
        equals(li_element_color, "#f00");
    });
});

this just doesn't feel right because it basically just doing this:

var my_li= $("li.my_element");
my_li.css("background-color", "#f00");
if ( my_li.css("background-color") == "#f00" ) {
    return true;
}

Am I nuts? How is this supposed to be done?

edit: the heart of the question:

I guess what I'm getting at is, I need to make sure the code isn't broken before I deploy, but the vast majority of it is UI helpers and ajax. How do I test that things are appearing correctly?

A few examples:

• test that a JQuery UI dialog is appearing on top of all other elements
• test that the drag-n-drop is working properly
• test that the color of a droppable changes when an element is dropped on it
• test that the ajax is all working properly
• test that there are no extraneous commas that will break IE