Originally Posted by 2bet

they have removed it from Webmaster tools to take the focus off of it, but they are not removing it from the toolbar. They use this info to determine many things when listing sites. Google has made it very clear they the use of PR by webmasters and the original purpose in the development have been blown way out of proportion, so this is to let people know that PR is for Google, not for Webmasters. With that, google has not released that they are going to remove it all together, or not continue updating it, they just want to remove it from their tool section since its not a necessary tool for determining how well your doing.