For about two years the SEO community has been talking about the growing importance of factors other than links, and the decreasing importance of links. This sounds good, and it lines up with how Google would like search to work i.e. making it harder to game the rankings.
However, after watching Google's SEO spokesman, Matt Cutts, talk about Panda 2.0 and how lots of sites are going to be penalized for having "unnatural" link patterns it is clear that links are really important. If they weren't Google would not have spent a year developing an algorithm to penalize players that don't play the game the way they want it to be played.
My take away is that links are really important and will continue to be important for a long time. What the link profile looks like, and how the links need to be set up is definitely changing, but the importance of links is not changing.
