If you have a site about Austrian Albino Hedgehogs you will be first in Google for “Austrian Albino Hedgehogs” the day Google learns you have a site. You wouldn’t need a single backlink, and PR wouldn’t matter.
Again, PR is a relative strength rating for a website. It doesn’t directly effect where you will rank, but in an extremely competitive industry like online gambling you better plan on having a PR4 or higher before you rank for competive terms. Ranking high for “echeck casinos” doesn’t take much, ranking high for “online casinos” will take a couple of years to achieve for a new site.
Gooner, you have a long-standing site, so any new pages you add will fare much better with Google since they have decided to trust you already. For those of us stuck in the sandbox it doesn’t really matter what we do, Google doesn’t yet trust us, so we are stuck at the bottom of the results.
One last point, the toolbar PR is not the real PR. Once Google finds a page on your site, it is assigned a PR score, and when they find a new link to your site, your PR score is affected immediately. Google only pushes out the PR score you see in the toolbar about every 3 months, but they work with the real PR score that is behind the scenes.