It's definitely not a throw away extension. I played with the .info for a long time in years past but never really amounted to anything. In the end I ended up pointing handsonwebhosting.info back to our main page as it just wasn't going to get the exposure it needed.
Who knows, maybe one of these days I'll put up a page similar to our LLC page which hilights the things that our company does, but for now, it just sits as a parked domain.
.info domains SHOULD, in theory, rank just as high as a .com domain name. At the end of the day it's really about how much promotion and backlinks you're getting for your domain name. A .info can and should rank as well as any other domain name, sometimes even higher as "info" can be used as a keyword in the domain title too.
Search for "web hosting info" and check out what pops up first

Yet, something like "shopping cart info" doesn't show at all (also because it was just a purchased domain that they're squatting on for a sale).
But you get the idea.