I can't give you proofs, but in my experience it is like cabowabo told you. Internal linking structure is important. I have a PR6 page and I made some "smart" changes and removed many links that pointed internally to different sections and pages of my site.
Result: Three months later, I lost between 10 and 30 positions in most keywords.
So, take advantage of your most important page and use it to link internally. It is not a matter of how much page rank you will be passing to internal pages. It is a matter that you are linking them from an important page that has the same theme. Perhaps it is the same as passing page rank, but I like to think of it in terms of logical organization of links and topics.
Another thing. Keep those links for a long long time. Don't remove them.
When my page rank was raised from 5 to 6, my homepage didn't get more traffic, but in general my whole site started to receive more traffic due to links pointing from my homepage. Now I removed them and I still have PR6 but 40% less traffic!
Hope this helps.
Enrique
