I'm running a semi-commercial website, for it's major keyword the site was ranked no. one in Google for years. But when Google changed it's algorythms again a couple of months ago, my site went from one to five. Ahead of me, not actually relevant competing complete websites, but only less relevent sub-pages and single articles of big players like Wikipedia or Time.com. This shows to me that Google is totally overweighting the Pagerank of a domain. Actually I moved up to rank two again, after removing all links to Wikipedia or to the Time.com article, this helped since links from my sites luckily are heavily weighted for my keyword, my site has PR 6. I guess I'm not the first one who was removing relevant links just for the sake of getting beter Google rankings, and I think this shows a major flaw in the PR system, and it's negative effects for the quality of the link sections of web sites. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but I think this could more and more harm the "classic surfing experience" on the Internet. Don't get me wrong, I think the idea of the Google Pagerank and link popularity system is excellent, and was without question the key to Google big success, but it seems in effort to get rid of spam, they are wighting Pagerank now so heavily that it's getting very counter-prodictive.
I don't think it's about pagerank, but more about "trusted/authority sites". Yours is authority too, as the removal of links case shows. I have a project, and am only slowly climbing with it over some subpages of major US universities, tough task (for me). And not about "pagerank".
Yes, and too often the sites at the top of the page are not really relevant to the search. G will probably change again, hopefully for the better. I suspect they want to be best, but I usually look elsewhere if I want a search. They still drive the traffic so we are climbing all over each other to top the G.