I guess that at begginign PR was thinked having natural linking on mind. Since Google, for some reason, make it public, they change the way people manage their links. Today is almost 0% the percent of natural do follow links, so the links dont show nothing today. Its all manipulated. I guess thats why Google is fading out PR. Many authority sites are using nofollow because they do not want to loose their PR, so natural linking is dead.
Google will take things too far it will make every website Link to nothing. Because of fear of getting penalised or loosing PR. PR is a mind game if you ask me, doesnt strike anything in my books for anything that you need to worry about the sooner everyone forgets about PR the better.
I don't think Google has faded out PR, but I certainly agree that the use of NOFOLLOW is being abused. Nofollow is a doubled edged sword for the search engines. It provided a short term solution to a spam problem, but these days many sites are nofollowing natural links while following paid links.
Why don't people just stop worrying so much about pagerank, and focus on having good sites? I mean.. if people enjoy your site, use your site, and it's a good site, so what if it's only a PR2?
Yes, but as long as Google keep this PR stuff as one way of obtaining traffic, PR will be in the mind of people. However, my point is not being concerned about PR. But trying to point that many naturall links are now set as nofollow by many sites, because maybe they feel worried about loosing PR or be penalized. So, at this moment, many real and naturall links are fading out because of nofollow. Google made a mess and it will kill the PR concept in my point of view.
The internet would be a much better place if we all forgot about pr and stop trying to manipulate it or benefit from it.
The problem is that all this PR stuff makes internet so unaturall. Many people publish a lot of stuff (like articles, forum posts, etc) that are not "naturall". I mean the only reason for that kind of thing is because backlinks. So, every real web page implies tons of trash content just because people need backlinks. I guess all this will kill Google sooner or later. They loose their was sometime ago.