I agree with you Andrew, but maybe a little less sarcastic =)
TooSmart: We already have this in Linxu, but for security reasons, you don't want to "run around with a big gun that has a really short barrel" all the time. Root-priveleges are powerfull. Therefore you have to use the sudo-command that gives you root-priveleges only when you want to do someting potentially dangerous.
qense(Idea reviewer)
wrote on the 19 Jan 10 at 19:48
It would be very dangerous to give regular users all or even a part of the root permissions. They already have a part of the permissions via sudo or via PolicyKit, which both require authentication.
Giving them more permissions would lead to unsafe situations like we can see in the case of Windows XP and which Microsoft is desperately trying to make less of a problem in Windows Vista and Windows 7; unfortunately they're hindered by a lot of applications that assume they run with administration rights.
Ubuntu should make sure it never gets in such a bad situation.
sudo is the best approach, rather than giving users free rein. I would, however, like to see root's password being used for administrative stuff rather than the user's password. It's done that way on all the other Linuxes I've used.