Bare metal customers get access to the whole machine. We get to access the BMC for remote management (console, power management, etc). Apparently, you can configure the BMC via tools running in the host OS, without needing to authenticate to the BMC; I've used this to fix BMC provisioning errors, that would otherwise require a SL tech to fix via physical console in the bios screen.
Ah, interesting. I wrongly assumed the SoftLayer bare metal servers might be closer to EC2's bare metal offerings where, from the outside, you're given the same set of management tools as a VM, and from the inside, a fairly limited hardware surface area is exposed to you.
