This is an Editor's Choice for publishing on Sphinn's home page.

Kind of obvious though

Currently we are working with an european client, this article is gonna help us a lot answering the domain and hosting related questions, thanks !

I've read extensively about this on all the usual sites as I'm working on a project now that has to serve about 10 different countries in 6 different languages.  The impression I got from reading Cutts and reading around the various sources from people who currently own ccTLDs is that they're irritated because .com TLDs are outranking them on local searches.  From what I read, I believe, Cutts (who is not a golden God, but is as good a source as anyone) said that ccTLD gives you a leg up on someone without a leg up, but that they had de-emphasized it.

If I had to guess based on what you've got here and what I've read, I would guess (without any empirical evidence) that they de-value location for countries with high concentrations of hosting and place more value on location for countries with less hosting and that they do the same with TLDs that are restricted by law versus those that are open (e.g. .com.au versus .com).  Still, that last paragraph's a total guess.  The only thing I know for sure that I've researched (at least through a month or so back) is that a ccTLD will give you a leg up, but that if you have server location and content you can edge out a content relevant ccTLD for local searches in that country.

Not sure if that helps, hurts or adds nothing to the discussion!