In my opinion, yes , it is important to get a good pr because a good pr means also good traffic and good rankings on google, and ifyou have good rankings on google you will have good rankings and on the other search engines.
no matter you focus on PR or not, once your site becomes good and well ranked in SERP, you will have nice PR anyway
personally i dont care about PR its about traffic PR matters in a sense that having low PR makes selling ad space harder
I can see that it splits opinions i can see what people mean when they say that you must have good content however surely for people to see your content they have to visit your site or would this content be on other sites?? However you would also want to rank highly in google as they are the main search engine used on the internet and probably mobile devices??