This is a video dated august 2011 I found and Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, answers the question: "Google treats .co as a generic TLD?". I selected this video because it gives an idea of how future new domain names could be considered in Google's algorithm. The .co extension is the country code Top-Level Domain for Colombia.
We all want to know if a wine web site ending with a the ".wine" extension will be better indexed than the same web site ending with a ".us" (.wine ans .us are examples here, question is the same for .rugby domain names).
The answer is clear to me:
It treats .co domain names like the country code Top-Level Domains they represent: domain names for the country of Colombia, then;
.co domain names can be adapted (cheat ?) to the web site's content using Google tools.
For the average user who will buy a new domain name, it seems like what the domain name extension really mean will seriously be taken into account.
