I'd be more interested in this article if it looked at more current sources, rather than the original PageRank algorithm, a three-year-old blog post, and a blog post from a few months back.

If your link building is mainly aimed at getting link juice, then page rank should be considered. But if your link building is for traffic generation and increasing the back link count, then page rank does not need to be given more importance.

Interestingly, many people deride PageRank because it is one of a hundred (or hundreds?) of factors that go into the ranking of a website.  However, PageRank can also be an indicator of several other elements ralated to link-popularity and domain trust.  The PageRank of an individual page is a signal of how that page is valued, and even if that PageRank is 0, the PageRank of the home page gives an idea of domain trust.

Of course, PageRank tells us nothing of relevancy; you have to figure that out for yourself.  And of course, there are such factors as you might sometimes control (regardless of PageRank), such as anchor text, the page you choose to link to and surrounding text.  Whether you value PageRank or not, these factors must be determined independently.

If you are exchanging links, PageRank is the currency of the Internet.  Just as with items in a store, each page is assigned a value.  In the store, items are assigned a price.  On the Internet, pages are assigned a PageRank.  In the store, if you are hungry, you won't buy a razr; the purchase still has to be relevent to your goal (satisfying your hunger).  On the Internet, if your website is about travel, you want seek out links from a used car website; the link still has to be relevant to your topic.

Does this mean PageRank is useless?  Of course not.  The price of each item of the store is an important part of deciding what to purchase, just as much as the ingredients and the relevance to your needs.  Currency is important, and PageRank is the currency of the Internet.