Will .eu work for SEO?

The launch of the .eu domain for the European Union countries has led to a certain degree of controversy, as many domains may have been squatted. But how will Google and other search engines deal with this new TLD? Up until now ccTLDs, such as .ie (Ireland), .co.uk (United Kingdom) etc., have been used, in part at least, by Google and others to provide "local" results. Will this lead to a new Google search option? Instead of choosing "pages from Ireland" will we have the option to choose "pages from Europe"? Maybe we'll see Google.eu launching to deal with this at some point in the future, however it won't be immediately, as the current application is still pending with Eurid (like so many others) Of course a lot of this is quite academic. What will be of real interest is how the .eu will affect a site's page rank and general search result positioning. Unfortunately it is too early to tell, as the domain has only been "live" for a few weeks.