[carpeperdiem]

As Padraic said, the quality/relevance of the incoming links are worth far more than quantity.

A PR6 on a site that is the leading blog for discussion about your customer that links to a specific page, with the name of your product in the link is worth many times more than a "our friends" link to your homepage from a site that is not related to your products.

There are 2 basic issues: 1) SEO value; 2) do you really want to send your customers away from your site for any reason?

The value of an outbound link is negative PR/SEO value.
The risk of losing a customer to an outbound link is worth even less.

In my opinion, focus on getting inbound links that are not reciprocal, and the incomings must be from high PR sites that are relevant. That's why "media" is a good start. (I consider blogs and messageboards to be media.)

This is turning into SEO discussion... if it continues we can move this to SEO sub-forum.