  Top quark pair production is one of the cornerstones of the physics program
at hadron colliders. In this contribution, we further explore the
phenomenological implications of the recent NNLO calculation of the total
inclusive cross-section. We provide a comparison of the scale dependence of the
top pair hadroproduction cross section at different perturbative orders and
study its perturbative convergence (with and without soft-gluon resummation).
We also sketch how the NNLO top quark cross-section could be used to improve
searches of physics beyond the Standard Model.
