Yeah, .org is good for ranking. There you go with 1 of 200+ points that effects your ranking. Now, you have to concentrate on another 199+ aspects.
Many .org site is performing very well, Google does not differentiate a domain name in regards to its extension.
Sure. There some factors that differ domain extensions but that is mostly for the country related tlds.
i think it might be a bit easier to gain backlinks in some niches with a .org domain, but for the rest google treats all tld's the same
you will NOT get any better benefit from ORG domain. in terms of SERP ranking, pretty much all TLDs are valued the same. you will still need to do the same amount of work to get the site ranked
I have seen many people quoting Matt Cutts about Google ranking .info's slightly lower, but I haven't seen the original source. For .org, I had only heard mentions of positive discrimination, that is, if Google does differentiate, it ranks .org's higher. I'd think though that it is very unlikely for the smart people at Google to do such thing. I had read someone picking up exact kw domains in different extensions, building same backlinks etc. in order to test this out. Wow, that is another thing I won't be able to reference to. I will update if I find out further.