Google employee stated : We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. Details: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a1d6250e26e9e48&hl=en I know it's old news now but how this will gonna affect those who sell links based on PR?
Why so many threads like this? I mean seriously, Google has not ditched PR just because it is not displayed in webmaster tools. They created some buzz by removing it because the caffeine news was dying out. Google wanted to create some buzz in the webmaster community and you are doing your part to help them out!