hello, after seeing every body running after high pr and a couple of events happened to me i have a statement: 1-page contents specially page title which is related to the contents of the page is important for serps. 2-number of links from related high quality pages with the right anchor text affect your serps. 3-page rank if gained by high quality related links will affect serps. 4-page rank if gained by crappy or unrelated links is big zero you can find pages with the higher pr in the 10th page. 5-domain age effect serps. 6-i think in a matter of months Google will concentrate more on page content quality as they know that most of links are build by website owners not normal visitors. so the solution will be giving a higher value to visitors average time on pages, human overview ratings offered by some indexes and directories that skilled humans view websites before listing like blogger.com and similar websites. and the link counting will go for ever.
i am preparing a mathematical method of measuring competition and expected position that i will publish soon when i finished and after trials
the thing that is best for visitors is best for SEs as well... Here is another good pr~ serp discussion thread