BigDave - 7:03 pm on Dec 15, 2002 (gmt 0)

And it's in Google's own interests to favor sites with outbound links, since Google's "unique selling proposition"--PageRank--is based on widespread linking.

I believe that this is the whole point here. Google would never encourage sites to take isolationist attitudes. They want you to link to other sites to feed the pagerank algorithm.

And to get back to the initial question, my links pages often show up high in the SERPs, above pages with higher PR.