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To my knowledge, non-mana abilities go onto the stack in the same manner instants would. However a sacrifice in the cost is paid regardless along with the ability being placed onto the stack.

The reasoning behind your example however, is because the ability is on the stack. That ability will resolve even though the creature isn't in play anymore. It destroys the creature, but the ability was still on the bottom of the stack and resolves unless you counter that ability with something such as Squelch.

It could seem that what's happening with the stack is making a special exception for creature abilities -- the Piper is dead before it can play the flute, for crying out loud! But I don't think the stack is supposed to describe a temporal chain of events.

I find it helps to think of any set of effects resolving off the stack as happening all within an arbitrary length of time, but in no particular order. Imagine reading about a battle in a fantasy novel that is described not in sequential order, but only by it's aftermath; at some point the piper summoned a creature, there was a flash of lightning, and your elf was killed. The details of these events are up to your imagination.

Thank you for the explanation fellas.

I think I was imagining the stack incorrectly.

This makes me understand how powerful the Stoneforge/Batterskull combo was for example.

It's just interesting since an instant really can't respond to a creature ability to stop it, but you can use a creature ability in response to an instant

You can use an instant in response to a creature ability, but the problem with that is there isn't many instants in standard that affect the ability itself. For example, someone taps Royal Assassin to destroy your tapped creature. In response you Unsummon the creature. There's just less situations that this is useful in the current standard.