Algorithm wise it would make sense that google would rank things like this as less worthy.

For one thing most authoritative domains for pagerank purposes are not going to have these "hacks" they are going to have the usual suspects (.com .net .org .edu .gov .info .etc to name the obvious US ones).

"Plenty of popular domains using ccTLDs rank just fine."

"Plenty" is not a large number when you are talking about tens of millions of sites that don't do it this way.