I was thinking along the same lines. I have the PR factor so ingrained in my head that if it's gone, I won't know what to shoot for. I'll have to reprioritize my goals. The golden chalice will be gone.
Yes, finally they updated it before 2014. Matt Cutts may not be too surprised but whole webmaster community is shocked.
I think one of the reasons Google doesn't want to update Pagerank too often is that it still does play an important role in their algorithm, and they don't want to make it easy to game the system.I believe what they have done is add numerous micro penalties into the PageRank algorithm so that even a good pagerank can be problematic if a number of tests are not passed. It's hard to imagine that page rank is going to leave their algorithm anytime soon. But what they have been able to build through all the data is a big history of linking and content over many years. So within that they can build micro penalties and other algorithmic intricacies that make it harder to game the system.
I'm not trying to 'game' the system but my PR took a dip, anyway. I'm not sure I'll ever figure all this out.