All the infrastructure is in place to make it a major coin. Peercoin for example has a 100+ million market cap, but only 550 tera hash to secure its network. Compare that with iXcoin with 10,200 tera hash. Also, I don't see any new PeerCoin innovation, their client is still back on version 0.6 or something.
PeerCoin doesn't really need hashes to secure the network, it's secured by other means.
You are entirely mistaken. PPC proof of work secures the network, PPC proof of stake keeps the network moving when there aren't enough miners to secure the network. You can see how it works by just looking at the block explorer. When miners can't keep up with the difficulty, PoS kicks in.
Sorry to say, but the one who's mistaken is you.
In PPC PoS secures the network while PoW is supplementary and helps distribute coins.
PoW blocks are granted score of 1 while for PoS score is computed as
(CBigNum(1)<<256) / (bnTarget+1)
It means that any PoW block can be overwritten by a PoS one. So PoW doesn't contribute to chain security.
You can check GetBlockTrust method in main.h.
MarkM would be the perfect tie-breaker here.