most people tend to think the sentence "PR is not important !" in the wrong sense.Let me make this clear to you here. Suppose say there is a keywd.phrase " x y z " and you are going to rank for it.Now how would you do the analysis and come to a conclusion that the top competitors are beatable?would you rely on the page rank?Well,there are two options: 1.see the page rank ,get p*ssed off - which is the wrong method which most people have been saying but still some argue that it is correct, 2.you must look at the anchor text - which is the real exact perfect method. you should see the anchor text variations of the competitor - how many links are out bound that have the anchor text "x y z" - hope this helped.But i have not covered a lot more things in this topic since i think there are already lots of resources explaining this.So you could just read them for more info.
Tell me what comic book did you cut and paste this stuff out of? I like stories like this, the one where the little guy gets the girl and all of that.