I think people are assuming that most sysadmins won't enter their sudo passwords into random prompts (not necessarily a sound assumption). From there, one easy way to get root that most people understand/know is to have physical access to the machine.
Probably young linux enthusiast Billy, who switched from windows a week ago because a friend installed him ubuntu, he went into some random internet forum and copy pasted a bunch of commands on the little black(or redish?) and white screen to improve "performance"
