In fact, in a webmasters event http://moderator.appspot.com/#16/e=7a9a last year, this question was posted to the Googlers

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QUESTION:
"Until recently (the last six months or so) a high ranking was achievable by submitting articles to article directories (providing they were 40%-60% unique), it no longer seems to be the case. Have links from article sites been de-valued at all?"

ANSWER By Matt Cutts:
In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it’s hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you’d see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience. If you’re thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it’s nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.
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So if you are expecting to create a website by just putting together ezinearticlees on your site, think again.

1 – those articles have been used by 1000s of other websites, many with higher authority and trust levels than your site

2 – you don’t know if the value of those articles have been discounted by the search engines (is Google giving a page rank to pages of those articles in other sites, or are they grey barred?
References :
Article Marketing and How it Impacts Search Engine Rankings http://www.powerhomebiz.com/blog/2008/10/article-marketing-and-how-it-impacts.html