Where did my PageRank Go?!

This week I stumbled upon an interesting forum thread on Google Webmaster Central. It appears that Google Webmaster Tools has removed the PageRank metric from their site reports. In the post, a Google employee provides details on why PageRank was removed from the tool:

We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)

More details on why not to obsess over PageRank here:

http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--crawling--indexing---ranking#pagerank

Time for some sleuthing. It has been known for some time in the SEO world that PageRank is simply a helpful indication of a website's authority, but not the entire picture. The point above reinforces the idea that you should not focus on metrics like PageRank when looking for linking opportunities or your website's search engine rankings. It's important to keep the "big picture" in mind when building your site. Creating good content that people would link to naturally is the ultimate goal.

Is your company consumed with the PageRank on it's website? What metrics do you use to help measure success?