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.
Be sure I have considered orphaned chains. I mention it in the rough draft of the white paper. Yes please let's not dig into the details of this yet. I need to be further along in the implementation before giving any more hints. Sorry to put out a teaser when not ready to publish, but mainly I just needed to get some feedback on the name and also start showing some coding progress to build some confidence (and perhaps synergies with other developers) in the community. I wish I was ready to publish the design today. I am moving as fast as I can.