I've written some blogposts before for friends tech blogs among other things and one post was a TechMeme top headline. It eventually lead to thousands of page views, not just from Techmeme clicks but including other sites covering it from reading TechMeme.
It's definitely got some influence and is hugely important for bloggers as it gets your name out there. Especially if you blog on your own and not for a larger entity.
Ugh. I didn't even know that leaderboard page existed.
Oh yeah. For when you really want to turn "hitting Techmeme" into a game. :)