Yes right.."content is the king" of all..mainly back links are increased from the good content...from the content everyone gets the idea of the site and whatever your purpose is..
I think both are important...As for me, backlinks help to rank content on higher positions and good content helps to minimize costs for backlinks=)
First of all without content what are you getting indexed for. Google relies on content to index websites. Compelling contenet will draw others to link to you. You absolutely need both. Again you could have 100,000 backilinks to a blank page. Will that page come up in search? NO! the more content the more you come up for KW's.