Does Permanent 301 redirection affect Google PageRank?

Webmasters and Bloggers are always wondering about What will happen to their Google pagerank if they moved their blog/site to another domain? How long does it take to pass page-rank from one typical site to another redirect through 301 permanent redirection?

The answer to the former question is that “NO” Permanent redirection will not affect your Google pagerank. If you remember, I too have redirected from TheWebdale.com (having Google pagerank-3) to BlogSolute.com While searching for the time required to get back my google pagerank- I found a thread in Google groups saying-

301s pass PR and related signals appropriately. Usually takes a couple of weeks for things to smooth out, though.

I thought it would take couple of months to get back my pagerank but Google is more smart, fast and intelligent than I think, isn’t it? Well, maybe Google picks up the changes within a couple weeks. I.e. the time it takes to crawl the new information and URLs. But maybe by the time all this data is processed it takes longer? I am saying so because BlogSolute.com is very well indexed by Google in the mean time.