Of course PR is important. The tool bar PR is not as important as its a historical representation of the internal Google PR.

PR is one factor (a small one in the ranking algorithm); PR is a measure of the number and quality of the links to a site (and the links are an important ranking factor); PR is a key factor in determining how often and deeply a site is crawled.

Nelonez - ...Google updates PR daily; when it does export to the tool bar, the consensus was that its about 2 weeks old at that stage.