Again, with all due respect, meta tags have little to do with page rankings now. Content is king, links from various similar web sites are very important, no flash, updating content in a timely manner. These are very important to page ranking once Google releases your site from the sand box.
Meta tags are still looked at, they just have a much smaller influence on rankings than they did just 3-4 years ago, at least for Google rankings.
If they were used in their originally-intended way, then yes
But what happened was that wise-guys would spam their meta-tags with all sorts of irrelevant key words in the hopes of getting people to come to their web page (even though the web page had no content that was actually relevant to what the user was looking for).
Google is used because users are able to find what they are looking for. If they find that sites they would have wanted to find are not listed on google, or their searches turn up too many irrelevant sites, they will start using some other search engine that gives them better results. This is why google has an incentive to "blacklist" sites that try to spam their way into peoples search results