Proof: My full name is Andrew Rouhafzai. When I comment on blogs (most of which are nofollow), I sign my name as such, or sometimes even as just Andy R. Funny enough, my website FakeSend.com ranks Number 1 for my full name on Google. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=andrew+rouhafzai&aq=f&oq= FakeSend.com never mentions any part of my name anywhere, not on a single page. That can only lead me to conclude that Google still gives some benefit to links that are nofollowed. How else is it outranking pages that have my name in the <title> tags, and outranking blog posts about me. It even outranks a post from Parallels saying I won a contest from them. I think Google is giving too much weight to inbound link anchor text. I thought they had fixed this somehow so that people couldn't google-bomb anymore?
Nofollow tag is not a myth, you were able to achieve the #1 position in google for your name because it is not competitive if you were able to achieve these results for "real estate" or any other search term which is extremely competitive that would be a completely different thing.
How does that disprove what I said? My website is ranking for my name which only had links from sites that nofollowed the URL. And regardless, my name is still relatively more competitive than a random series of letters.
I think Google gives some importance to rel no follow links, if the keywords are not very competitive.