Is Pagerank still important?

There has been a lot of debate in recent months about the importance of pagerank. Is it still important for webmasters? The problem lies in the subjective nature of the web. In many respects there are very few accurate barometers of how "important" or "popular" a site is. Google PR (PageRank) used to be one of the defacto measures of a site's "importance", but it never was the only one. Another barometer some people like to use is Alexa, but it's not the most accurate for several reasons, not least of them being that only users with an Alexa plugin contribute to the "rank". Of late Google has been taking longer and longer to update the PR of sites, so you might be better off looking at inbound links and other metrics....