I think Peter may be on to something. That would explain a lot. I think there may also be another side to this. I think that it may not be talked about much, because everyone is still thinking in the same old way, including me. What if, links have become less important, only marginally mind you, but at least a little. I have seen some sites, one or two of my own, with 0
pr, only a handful of moderately important links, and # 1 to 10 placement for important key words and phrases in that industry. This has been happening a little for quite some time, but seems to be escalating these days. What if Google had an updated set of algorithms that took more account of something like the size of a page, or it's relative importance, as far as robot semantics are able to determine? That would change a lot of things!
I am seeing pages indexed much more quickly, important content ranked more quickly, and much of this without the aid of large quantities of links. Of course, this is all just my humble opinion.