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Nobody knows what SE's do with meta tags, unless they work for 'that' search engine.
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Even if you worked for Google, or Yahoo, they section people off into "The Crawl team", "The indexing team", "The Algo Team", "The spam team", "The Adwords team", or whatever, so you might work for Google as part of the Spam Team for 20 years and not have a clue how Google ranks pages.
DangerDave,
MY OPINION:
Four months ago, Yahoo treated keywords in titles almost as well as it did keywords in the TITLE tag. Today, both keywords embedded in META keyword/description tags carry about the same amount of ranking boost. However, that boost is on par with one you'd get if you stuffed an H1 with keywords and shoved it on the bottom of the page - in other words, minimal. The on-page optimization that is most effective with Yahoo right now is high keyword density.
Both Google and MSN ignore meta tags in terms of ranking. I've tested it. However, not having META descriptions on your site may result in serious indexing problems with Google that may last over a year to resolve.
Part of Google's duplicate content filter *seems* to use similar description snippets (whether it be from META tags or on page text) as one factor and a site with messy HTML structure that also lacks a META description tag may get the wrong snippet crawled (e.g. navigation text) and in the end wind up largely supplemental. I've seen some sites with clean HTML structure have no problems with this, but if you don't know how Google constructs description snippets, you are taking a chance by not using unqiue meta description tags on every page.
BTW, that SEW chart is dated December 5, 2002. SE Algorithms change by the day.
http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html
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Content-Type is naturally the most-used value, since it's the standard way for giving the character encoding of an HTML page.
Next we have two name values: keywords, which these days is mostly useless, ironically, and description, which is still somewhat useful.
With progressively less usage are four more name values: robots, to control whether spiders should index the page or follow any of its links; generator, used to indicate what tool was used to generate the page; author, used to give the name of the author; and revisit-after, supposedly used to tell search engines how often to recrawl the page. To our knowledge only one search engine has ever supported it, and that search engine was never widely used — at this point, it is nothing more than a good luck charm...
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Straight from the mouth of a Google employee.