Of course there are confirmations but the confirmations are instant and decentralized. The key is to attain global 0-confirmation consensus on local instant confirmations.
Hashing your own transactions gives you local instant confirmation. But once you submit these into a chain of work, the selection rule means you can still get orphans.
You are assuming the design is essentially the same as Bitcoin etc. It should be obvious from the numbered items in the OP (and later comments from ion.cash) that it is not. I suggest waiting for further details rather than pointless debates on the basis of no detailed information about how it claims to achieve those.
More of these to be expected sooner than later. It's in the physis of human beings to question everything a-priori (ie: without first studying it). I'd propose a short synopsis of the project's basic aspects so that there are more participants involved and -hopefully- gain more attention from possible programmers. Of course there's a side-possibility:
Currently unreleased white papers will not be published until this coin is nearer to release to insure these designs are released first in our coin. Thus for the time being I may not be providing more details on how the above features are accomplished.
Just my 20c