Yep, could have an endless debate on this one. Page rank isnt the be all and end all. It can be useful for distributing "link love" to other pages or relevant sites. ....interesting starting thread by the way!
Well you build ranking on SERPs from backlinks, and you build PR from backlinks. Just that you need same keyword anchor text to build rankings, and you don't need keywords in anchor text to build PR. In either case, PR and Rankings are some how related, but it does not mean high PR rank better (unless they have their targeted keywords in anchor text).
Well, PR is very important since this is the figure show how good your webiste/blog. However, SERP is also very important to bring traffic to your site base on your keyword. In this case, through the backlink and keyword, we optimize the search engine
PageRank has nothing to do with traffic. You should read more before posting such nonsense. Just to help you out a bit, read this : http://www.google.com/technology/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
PR is a result of your rankings. You don't get high ranks from high PR You get high PR from high ranks. More links = higher SERPS. More links = more PR juice
Technically this isn't accurate at all. You want high PR? Make a "one page website" without any outgoing links. Buy links from PR 7 and 8 websites. Wait for the next update. You get high PR. There are plenty of low ranking but high PR websites out there. I have websites that get 10,000 unique visitors daily and are PR 3 or less. PR has NOTHING to do with SERPs and it hasn't since 2006.
but as I said, it is a result of your SERPs. If you are at the top of google you are going to naturally get links and they will naturally give PR. Unless you manipulate the results by buying PR 7 & 8 links. But that is not going to give you high SERPs and will end up being one of those "low ranking but high PR websites" as you stated. My response was an answer to the question It has a relationship to it.
Yes, PR is very useful. Some I like to say: A duplicated site may still be indexed by Google but its PR will be zero most of time. Give the thread a good rating if you like the thread.
..yes, PageRank is useful, to some extend, but not to some extend. We can not read it off completely, it is still useful...
I don't believe the lag time is anything like three months between calculation and export. On the contrary, I doubt it's more than three weeks. For example, one of my sites went from 5 to 4 when losing a sitewide PR6 link. The link wasn't gone for even two weeks, and even though I was ready for a small drop, I was surprised to see it updated within two weeks of losing the link.
We'll see. If this were true, that it's as close as a 2 week timeframe, I'd expect my sites PR to be higher than it is.
PR can be a factor for many reasons, one which is effecting me is backlinks from directories, more and more directory owners are listing sites by PR which is ridiculous, the excuse is "well if you did more work with your site your PR would be higher" Theres only so much you can do with static websites especial if they are new. So at the moment PR is a factor for me.
PageRank has some meaning or it wouldn't exist. Don't confuse the PageRank you can see on the Google toolbar with the actual rank of a site. Google only exports the rank to the toolbar a few times a year. Whatever rank shows in the toolbar for a site, its SERPS improves independently of the displayed value. If it didn't a sites SERPS would only jump when Google exported PageRank to the toolbar. A PR0 site doing well in search results will probably get a visible increase in PageRank on the next public export from Google to the toolbar.