Are keywords dead?

Back in March, we asked this question.  Most of you thought if they weren't dead, they were probably on life support.  Here's what Google had to say recently -

Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking.

What does this mean? Should we eliminate keywords?  There are those who say save the space, don't include them.  Google acknowledges keywords neither help or hurt you at this point (your not penalized for having them), and there are some other sites that still look at them.  Further, Google hasn't ruled out that it may revisit using them in the future. 

Bottom line it's the content that makes the difference.  If you want to have your site show up in Google, there will be need to be some keyword density in your text.