I suspect the mix of people skills and technical skills required for a DBA can vary greatly, although generally I would expect the people skill component to become more important as seniority increases. For example if you haven't a clue how to manage people, you'll never never manage a team; you may think you are doing it, of course, but other people will notice that you aren't so you'll soon find yourself doing something else unless you learn that skill quickly enough.

I started out without anything much at all in the way of people skills, but got good training as I drifted up the hierarchy and ended up with some abilities that I never, when younger, imagined I could acquire: for example the ability to appear to suffer fools gladly and to know when it would be inappropriate to exercise that ability. And yes, people skills are very important. But technical skills are important too, probably more important at most levels than people skills.

Being liked requires some excercise of people skills; it is not in itself difficult, unless you want to combine it with other skills like getting people to do what you need, ensuring that architecture and design are sound, and enforcing rigurous quality standards, all of which are things that can make you unpopular unless your "being liked" people skills show you how to tread firmly on people's toes without upsetting them - and that's where people skills get difficult. That's an example of people skills being important in enabling you to exploit your technical skills.

In the end I have to agree with what TravisDBA said about technical skills being what counts when we get right down to basics; but without an appropriate degree of people skill to back the technical skills up (which a gatekeeper like TravisDBA must have, even if he doesn't want to admit having it) it is almost impossible to excercise the technical skills effectively.

PS: that must read like a fence-sitting excercise. But that's not what it's meant to be.