The only real value “PR” has for me is that I can sell links from my sites on text-link-ads.com just because I have a high PR 
added to the fact that some other webmasters agree to do link exchanges because I have a pagerank.
Pagerank is simply a way to see how popular a site is in terms of the amount of sites linking to it and no direct link to SERPS.
To get decent rankings it’s simply a case of good content and links from/to relevant sites, obviously there is more to SEO than just that but thats the basic foundations of attaining good rankings IMO.