I recommend everyone to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank It seems that to many PageRank is just a number, but this number has meaning, or at least suppose to have: There are many domains which get PR despite their lack of incoming hyperlinks and especially NATURAL incoming hyperlinks with high PR. As you all know its very easy to fake PR and bypass those "Fake PR Tools" which basically run "site:domain.com" Google query and check if the results is equal to "domain.com". This is a very basic information which seems that many doesn't familiar with, and many scammers exploit this fact to steal money from naive buyers.
Does that sentence make it clear why people have been giving less and less of an emphasis on PR of their own site and more on the PR of backlinks? Until Google makes PR have true significance for the sites themselves, and create a good analytic system to correctly assign page rank, then people will misunderstand it and try to get high PR when all they need is high traffic, or think PR and traffic are always directly proportional. PR right now is either backlink generated or if the site has indexed content for 1 year+