Short answer
The Oxford English Dictionary is quite clear on this. For the verb clone there are two meanings:
Biology To propagate (an organism or cell) as a clone.
Molecular Biology To make copies of (a DNA sequence or gene).
The latter definition clearly encompasses PCR.
History lesson
Most of the information below is taken from the Oxford English Dictionary.
The term clone has a long history, first as a noun and more recently as a verb. The evolution of the meaning and use of the word suggests that we shouldn't be too precious about this.
When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.
The word is based on a Greek word for twig and was originally used as a noun in the form clon.
1903 H. J. Webber in Science 16 Oct. 502/2 Clons..are groups of plants that are propagated by the use of any form of vegetative parts.
It soon gained the final e.
1905 C. L. Pollard in Science 21 July 88/1 I therefore suggest clone (plural clones) as the correct form of the word.
By 1930 it had become a verb...
1930 Jrnl. Ecol. 18 357 This is probably a record for the number of ‘individuals’ obtained at one time by cloning a herbaceous plant
...and, presumably because bacteria were considered to be plants at that time, it was used in microbiology too.
1929 Bibliographia Genetica 5 234 In Bacillus coli communis...a biotype was also found having lower motility than the remainder of the clone from which it came.
By the early 1960s it was extended to animals, probably as a direct result of Gurdon's experiments with Xenopus
1963 J. B. S. Haldane in G. Wolstenholme Man & his Future 352 Perhaps the first step will be the production of a clone from a single fertilized egg, as in Brave New World.
And finally the meaning was extended to encompass DNA molecules, thus molecular cloning.
1974 Proc. National Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 71 3459/1 ColE1 has been shown to serve as an effective molecular vehicle for cloning and amplifying specific regions of unrelated DNA.
(Extra points if you have read this far AND you know what ColE1 is.)
This final quotation seems to me to show that the confusion over what molecular biologists mean by cloning arose very early. If cloning means “to make copies of” then why is the word amplifying there? From the outset I think that molecular cloning carried the sense of purifying (by cutting and ligating). Or that's what I thought when I did it for the first time in 1980.
Update
Despite my reliance on dictionary definitions above, and prompted by Tyto alba's discovery of a contradictory definition in a different OUP publication (see comment) here's what I really think:
Anyone who has ever obtained a bacterial colony containing a plasmid with the inserted fragment that they wanted announced "I have cloned the gene!" and meant that they had made a recombinant plasmid AND got it into cells. On the other hand, if they started with a PCR amplification then ran a gel to check before ligating and saw a fragment of the expected size they did not say "I have cloned the gene!" And finally, the successful cloner, when streaking out their transformant colony, will rarely have referred to this step as cloning.
