I do think it's an absolute waste of time to check the backlinks reported through the google link: command. It doesn't mean a thing.

Then again, I don't think checking google PR across data centers is worth our time either. That does mean something, but the real metric is the amount of visitors a site gets. I am interested to see what queries people use to get to my site, and whether I can increase that number per query or in general. Backlinks are a numbers game. Since most links that get reported are probably worth very little for the actual rankings, I wonder what looking at them actually teaches. More interesting is: who is not linking to this site that should be?

It's a good point you have brought up here. It almost seems like Google are phazing out the link command in favour of the Webmasters central tools, why?

Think about it, only the owner of the site can access the link info for a particular domain using the Webmaster central tools, anybody can use the link commmand to see which sites are linking to a high ranking site and replicate that.

Google removing this valuable link info means people can't copy successful sites link structure.