I do know that image links count. Text links have a heavier weight though so I'm not really going to suggest relying on this too much. Just do it if you can.
Oh ok i see what your saying, took a few reads to get what you meant by that. So like statcounter used to imbed a 1px image on your site to gather data, it would not be a link but the image would be pulled from the the statcounter.com site rather than being hosted on myown site. (Hotlinking I believe its called) That should clear things up for people. Well my experience is that statcounter as an example has amazing PR and Alexa rankings because of this very reason. So I would have to say yes. Correct me if im wrong