Well IMO John is right that the tough rankings will need some anchor text linking to get the rankings, but John tends to seperate the various parts of what I like to call holistic
SEO into the
SEO side and the marketing side whereas I think the two should never be seperated.
Web pages are built for viewers and for the forseeable future you will have to have on-page content for those viewers and to convert them into customers. That being the case why not optimize the page content and get the extra ranking that's going to give you? Might just be enough to put you on top of another power linker.
John and others have proved the worth and power of anchor text links in getting rankings, but you need more than rankings to have a successful website.