Yes, altough Punkbuster seems to get more confident in issueing Global Bans more often now. But mostly its still just a 2 minute kick for detected hacks as Aimbot, Wallhack etc.
There are no hardware bans, maybe they were issued a long time before, but right now Punkbuster is not issueing such bans.
Communities like PBBans are the deterrent :)
Punkbuster is not perfect and could work better, yes, but i it is still a solid anti cheat. At least better than VAC if you ask me. I still have control what i make out of those violations Punkbuster issues, i either ignore them completely and dont care about it, or i join communities and share my busted punks ;) Of course i could just issue permanent bans on my servers for all caught cheaters on my server, all those violations are saved in the punkbuster logs of a server.
If you dont like how Punkbuster handles with cheaters, you better play a game with VAC anticheat ;) but if that is better for you is a completely different case ...