I am glad. It will force people to make decent websites. There are too many PR6, alexa-1 million, useless link farms cutting around here recently. When toolbar pr is officially dead, the "link exchange forum" on DP is going to be a killzone! Only decent websites with decent content and traffic will get trades. That's the way it should be.
may be google is developing their own verson of PageRank, and we might soon see a new way to scale websites.
It is clear from google employee JohnMu the pagerank is not dead.. so, concentrate on other factors other than PR.