I was reading Matt Cutts' blog from yesterday, about the Toolbar Page Rank update Google are going to be rolling out   and apart from thinking that is was really soon after the last one, I noticed a couple of interesting things on the comments:

One of the commenters, Dave (original) said, "Out of interest, does Google have any numbers of Google toolbar users who *don't* own a web site that enable PageRank intentionally. My guess is they represent less than 1%."

To which, Matt Cutts' reply was, "I believe your intuition is way off on this one. The last time I checked, many many more users turned on the PageRank display than there are site owners. The PageRank display is actually a popular feature, as it turns out".

This is a very interesting thing to say. Whilst I appreciate that everyone is always trying to find hidden meaning in Matt's words, I thought this was interesting from a user perspective as well as an SEO one. If real people are using the Toolbar Page Rank (whether it means anything for rankings or not), then Google are going to see it as a useful user feature for the foreseeable future, however much SEOs find it an inaccurate measure of their performance.

This could also be why Matt posted there were "No immediate plans to put the PageRank kitty back in the bag".