Should We Really Care About Pagerank Anymore?

So Google have recently done another Page Rank update and I have seen sites lose and gain page rank without really much explanation, or really any indication that it counts for much these days. Its a bit like trying to rank for a single keyword term like “car” or “dave” as a vanity term when we know that the general searching population out there search for much longer search phrases these days. So is page rank turning into vanity – “What pagerank are you?” – rather than a good measure of quality.

I used to use the pagerank of a site as a measure of quality but nowadays I look more at the inbound backlinks of a domain or a site to get a feel for the true quality. Some PR1 sites that I have carry as much bang as some of my PR5’s, and depends on the links they have. So should SEO’s spend countless hours checking their PR and panicking if the site loses pagerank overnight in one of Google’s updates?

I still bow down to the high PR sites though and would still love for vanity to get my site to a PR7+