Here's a great example showing that it takes more than just a higher PageRank to be the #1 result in google for a given query. If you do a search for freitag on Google, you will notice that freitag.ch (the guys that make Freitag Bags, page rank of 4) beats my blog petefreitag.com (page rank of 7).

I noticed that google rolled out an update for their pageranks today. The pagerank you see from google toolbar, or pagerank status (firefox extension) are only updated around every two months.

Google does this to keep people guessing.

I have noticed that new web pages don't get a page rank right away, it actually takes quite a while. I checked on a couple sites including my blog, and it looks like it takes about two months to get a page rank assigned to your page.