<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"

does matter

[silverbytes]

Does that tag matter at all?
May affect the order with other meta tags? I mean can I place it last, or first, is the same?

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

[choster]

Matter for search engine positioning, I don't know and don't usually care. But it does matter if you want the page to display correctly, e.g. in a Roman font instead of Cyrillic, Urdu, or Hangul.

[wkitty42]

it matters only if your server doesn't set the header at all... i don't know what the result would be if the server set the header and the page sets the same header differently...

FWIW: i added it to my pages so that i could more easily validate them at the w3c site without having to have them on my server...