Nothing guarantees 1st place results, because you never know who your competitors for the keyterm might be.
of course some sites like USA.gov or edu sites with PR10...are important to people so that why they get a PR10...and as for google...they need to have that PR 10 because the interent revolves around them...
maybe PR 10 is a rang yes there are still a few PR10 sites around some records are listed here http://livepr.ezer.com/pagerank_pr10.asp
Yes, you caught it. Yahoo site explorer shows Google having 257,654,050 backlinks. That's a quarter of a billion! That just might help explain Google's PR10.
And of that quarter-of-a-billion, I wonder what percentage of them Google would rate as being 'bad neighbourhoods' and would drop the PR of, for instance, a site with a low PR because of these bad neighbourhood links.
I encourage you to do some Google searches on a variety of highly competitive keywords (I've done so). You will find consistently that most (not all) of the top ten results are high-PR webpages.
PR and traffic are different, a site with high PR may not have high traffic and a high traffic site may not have high PR... There are many edu sites with PR8 or more... but having less backlinks.. i dont know what is the criteria...
Google have 2,730,00 backlinks. I think that qualifies them for high PR. Just checked the Toolbar and it gives PR7, then I realised it's loading Google Australia.
.edu sites are, to the large part, a link farm. Think about it for a second. Where do all .edu links come from? Other .edu and .gov sites. Who owns those domains? The exact same people. They're all one in the same. If I registered a few thousand .com's and linked them all together, instead of passing PR to each other, I'd get slapped hard. Ahh, gotta love the PR