he never outright comes out and says it's wrong notice that. He's just saying it's not good because if you don't know what you're doing you could screw up and miss out a few pages.
Lol, he was the one that suggested pagerank sculpting for that purpose about a year and a half ago. I checked his blog, it is no longer there. It's kind of funny if you think about it. They made a mess with the nofollow tag.
Reading between the lines is an important skill if you are going to listen to matt cutts. He won't lie, be hes an ambassador between a corporation and its clients and you can expect him to have an objective not easily seen.
So, first G says: use no follow. Now( year after) they say: don’t or you dilute your PR,. I think they're just playing with webmasters. Running their little test on us. I never used no follow so I don’t have to worry about it. Than again, I never use google webmaster tools or any "free"( meaning: spying on you ) tools from G either.
The line that stood out to me was: "...parts of our system encourage links to good sites." I used to be diligent to get inbound links, but was very stingy giving outbound ones. Reading comments like the one above from Matt, I've begun to be more open to including outbound links to good sites. In fact, he seems to hint that Google rewards our doing that.
I know what you mean - PR is such a small part of the whole process. But I must admit everytime the bar goes more green for one of my sites, it does feel very very good ;-)