I found a great article written by Aaron Wall, on Page Rank and how it tends to be overemphasized these days .
When your site is new you will have a PageRank of 0. After you get a few links in about a month or two you will see your PageRank go up and it is usually one of your first signs of SEO progress. People see that and as they continue to work they associate their improved rankings with the improved PageRank.
Since PageRank is one of only a few visual signs of SEO progress (the others being inbound links and actual rankings) and it is often easier to get a mid ranged PageRank than it is to get strong rankings many people place too much focus on PageRank.
Another quote that I thought really hit it home, a very good piece of advice.
Getting links from lots of different locations has became important to rank well in Google’s search results. Since many people are exclusively focusing on PageRank many people are missing out by not buying lots of cheap links form various locations.