Google Page Rank Dead?

I noticed a Webmaster World thread this morning regarding the Google toolbar showing a grayed out PageRank for all sites.

Quite a bit of discussion on various search engine forums as noted by Search Engine Roundtable

– WebmasterWorld
– Search Engine Watch Forums
– DigitalPoint Forums
– Cre8asite Forums
– SEO Chat Forums
– HighRankings Forums
– SEOGuy Forums
– IHelpYou Forums
– WebWorkShop Forums
– SitePoint Forums

Also with some interesting coments by Aaron Wall, of SEO Book:

PageRank is cheap marketing for Google.

PageRank gives the average webmaster very little useful data while giving Google tons of marketing at a cheap cheap price, also inflating link costs for naive webmasters.

My bet is the usual outdated PageRank comes back soon, although they may take time on displaying the data again just to see what sort of chaos it causes.

I think Aaron is right on with this. We’ll see if Google Toolbar page rank is dead or is Google just testing?

UPDATE:
Apparently the absence of the Google Toolbar PageRank values was due to a glitch: PageRank Back

Ah, the PageRank myth continues….