Good question, Heather — I have been wondering about the same thing.
Randy — I’ve checked the backlinks for other sites (using Google’s link: operator), and some sites actually do have quite a few backlinks. Do you know why some sites show many backlinks while others show only a few? Is this because the sites with many backlinks actually have tons and tons of links behind the scenes? (i.e., is Google displaying only a small percentage of the total number of backlinks for every site in its index?)
Also can you (or someone else) elaborate on how Google is thwarting SEOs by doing this? If someone can get the backlink information from Yahoo, what does Google gain by limiting their own list of backlinks? Why not just list the information? If not all of it, at least enough to match the competition’s list.
Thanks for the Yahoo and MSN tool suggestion. They do provide better results (for my site at least).