Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still better to have the .com anyways, because then you aren't potentially competing on SEO with someone else with the same brand name and a "better" domain to use it with. Like it or not, .com domains are the de facto namespace for consumer-facing products and having the .com for your brand up for sale or already taken is just asking for problems.
Do you have any sources on SEO benefit to being a .com instead of a .net/.co.uk/.me? I know .edu's get a bump and I wouldn't be surprised if .com's did as well but I've never had that confirmed.
No they don't.
While some insist that simply having a .edu domain, regardless of the site’s quality, content, and incoming links, will give you more weight with the major search engines, it’s just not true. Who says so? Matt Cutt, a top engineer at Google, in this video.[1][2]
and
Sadly this whole engagement is based on a faulty assumption: It is not the Edu-toplevel domain which gives universities such a high relevance in Google for their references but the backlink-structure of the domains themselves. Universities have the advantage that on one hand, in most cases they have had online representations for a long time (stanford.edu for example was registered 1985) and on the other hand they have lots of content which was and is linked voluntarily. This is a long time to (unconsciously) build a “great” backlink-structure in Google's point of view.[3]
Hopefully that addresses your second point, too:
I wouldn't be surprised if .com's did as well but I've never had that confirmed
You should be astonished if they did.
Having said that, some early naive autocomplete implementations in browser address bars bias .com over other extensions. I'm not sure anyone has ever measured the impact of this.
[1] http://www.searchenginejournal.com/truth-about-edu-domains-r...
[2] The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EE163OGjfo&feature=gv
[3] http://www.sistrix.com/blog/751-the-.edu-domain-myth.html