A little intemperate but pretty much right IMHO. It's far too easy, bureaucratically, for someone to tighten a security screw than loosen it. So straightforward goofs like this (e.g. there's no permissions system in place for printer or wifi addition yet, so you need root -- just a architecture thing, not an authentication requirement) get locked down by their interaction with the security subsystem. So no one wants to make the call as to whether "security will break" if you allow printer configuration to non-root users. So nothing happens.

That said, modern linux certainly has mechanisms in place to handle this stuff. Fedora and Ubuntu don't seem to have a problem with seamless system configuration from the console user anyway.