Does Google count a text only link as a backlink?

Googlebot uses text links for link discovery. I've seen tests that show that Googlebot will crawl URLs that it could have only found through text mentions.

Google patent filings indicate that they use brand mentions to determine brand authority. That is text mentions of a brand name or of a domain name name are tallied to determine how highly regarded a website brand is.

I have not seen evidence that traditional link juice (PageRank) is passed when a URL is displayed as plain text. I would expect that it is not. Plain text URLs are easy to spam. There is no possibility with them to use the nofollow attribute to show that the mention was user created and not to be trusted.