Shaddows - 2:03 pm on Mar 12, 2012 (gmt 0)

That page started getting a LOT of referral traffic from the linking page right away... the link is irrelevant to the keyword or the topic of my page

Something else must be going on there. Regardless of the surrounding text, that link is either valuable to the sites users, or it isn't.

You say it provides traffic, so it must be useful. If it's useful, Google should be rewarding it.

Also, it is illogical to infer that surrounding text is irrelevant. At best, you can infer that poor context does not 100% negate link power, which can be restated as "context is not the only ranking factor affecting links" - and that is hardly revolutionary.