sounds about right Blitzen.
From what I've seen if you have a country specific TLD (.ca / .co.uk / .au / .co.jp etc.) it makes a difference as to whether you have those domains hosted in country or out.
For .com (not country specific) it doesn't seem to matter as much.
Also if you want rankings in a country other than USA you can be better served with a country specific TLD... eg.. I have clients who ONLY deal in Canada for their business and they noticed better rankings when we moved their sites to .ca domains from .com (ONLY in google.ca their rankings in google.com deteriorated a bit (page 1 to page 10-20)). But when you're in Canada and you go to google.com it automatically reads we're in Canada and changes it to google.ca (unless you know how to go around that which isn't too hard).
On the dedicated IP bit.. they are also correct... Where IPs definitely make a difference is your IBLs if the majority of your IBLs are all on the same IP (or IP block) they are not found to be as relevant since many
SEO's used to create many many domains to point to one domain to boost rankings.
Unless you have a .us extension I can't see it making a whole lot of difference. I saw reference to length of time and reliability.. those are the key things to worry about when it comes to hosting. But I wouldn't move my servers overseas if north america was my target. =o)