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I watched some TV shows showing cooks working in their restaurants. I use measuring cups and spoons when cooking almost everything, but do not see any of the TV cooks measure anything. They mostly just grab things and throw them in.
Do skilled cooks have no need for these tools?
Much more often, expert chefs will use an accurate digital scale, particularly for baking. Cups are OK for liquids, and most people use spoons for small measurments like salt or yeast, but scales are accurate for everything from flour, to honey, to water, to softened butter.
Plus, since you can generally tare scales, you don't have to wash anything out but the big bowl you're mixing everything in! Trust me on this one, a good digital scale is an awesome way to spend $16 - $25.
If you're not baking, chances are you don't need precision. You rarely need to measure ingredients, except for baking, once you're pretty competent.
EDIT: Just a note, I bake all my own bread and I always do it by weight. I use spoons for the yeast and salt, the scale for everything else. I have a habit of using a Pyrex measuring cup to nuke cold water, I stick a thermometer in it as it cools, and start mixing when it reaches 110F. So at that point, it gets poured from the cup to the mixing bowl. That has given me many opportunities to note the accuracy of the cups (my scale is very, very accurate, I test it all the time). Even standard Pyrex measuring cups, used properly (eye level, on a level surface) will give erroneous results. For 1 cup (237ml), you can do everything right with a measuring cup and still be off by as much as 20ml either way. That's over 8%. So I recommend weighing everything but tiny spoon quantities. Sometimes, I'll even break out my gram scale to weigh salt, but I have to find the recipe pretty intimidating to go that far.
Yes they do; mostly for baking and pastries where precision is more important.
For other types of cooking, precision is not that important.
Experience play a role when knowing the quantity needed for a recipe.
Also, most of the time, we see chefs (on TV or in real cuisine) handling small containers of prepared ingredients, and those are measured when they are doing "mise en place" before service begins.
In 3 years of working at a restaurant, I think I only saw measuring devices used by the pastry chef, and maybe the head chef when he was attempting a new creation.
After you have seen ingredients measured out hundreds of times, its get pretty easy to eyeball a teaspoon of salt or a cup of water. Measurements are very important for baking, but in most other cooking they are more of a guideline. So unless you need to be precise, an experienced cook is usually safe skipping the measuring device.
