I read this on Blogstorm, did you get the idea from that blog? Anyway, I disagree. I think anchor text is still very important.
You(we) need to emulate natural link building better or should have natural links.Other than that nothing has changed , you can not change a succesfull system that quickly you can only improve it.The basics (anchor text , backlinks) will stay the same.
Your SEO strategy is flawed if it revolves entirely around backlinks. There are plenty of blackhat and greyhat strategies that still work besides link spam. And for the record, anchor text has lost weight, but not serious weight.