That is 100 percent true, however if you have all of the other things, you will have more inbound links simply due to your visitors' and other webmasters' valuing your content. If they like it, they will link to it. If they can't find it, they won't. It all goes hand in hand. It is possible to have a mid page rank without the other elements of a quality website, but rare. You can achieve a high inbound link count through link farms and reciprical link sites, but the relavency of those links will generaly be poor. Google will give weight to those links, but only so far. Google likes relevent links, that can be acheived only by good content, proper backend coding and search engine placement.