If libpcre is present during emerge of www-client/links it will link against it (I then broke it by unmerging libpcre, thinking it was unused). If libpcre is not present at compile time, it doesn't use it (it uses libc's regexp functionality instead). I'm not sure quite what the right thing to do would be, but it seems unsatisfactory that it links to things it doesn't declare dependencies on... it's only a minor thing, though.
Fixed