Just posting this for my own future reference - Johnathon Delacour has a good post on the nature of trackbacks.

"I have no idea—to be honest, I don't really care—whether TrackBack will enable us to establish a more "truthful" web but it does seem to hold out the promise of allowing us to create more nuanced and inclusive relationships than a web based on links and PageRanks. Who knows? It might even reveal more of the very different thoughts that lie hidden, deep in our hearts."