You got it wrong, PR is still one of the important factor in ranking websites in search engines. Read the following experiment done by an SEO Expert and you will realize its importance - http://dejanseo.com.au/hijacked/ Hope this helps
OK let me clarify that...toolbar page rank (which people wait for Google to update) gets updated slowly so the PageRank you are seeing isn't necessarily your current page rank. From the article "Do not confuse the toolbar PageRank of zero with real-time PageRank which was calculated to be 4." "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank" So PageRank is very important in this duplicate content situation. Otherwise PageRank is one small piece in a very large algorithm.