Security trimming in SharePoint Central Admin

I was asked to help one of my clients trouble shoot a problem in their MOSS environment one day.  They gave me access to their Central Admin site and made me farm administrator.  After logging onto the Central Admin site, I noticed a couple of important links missing.  More specifically, "Create or extend web application" link doesn't show up in the Application Mangement tab and "Services on server" wasn't there in the Operations tab.  I thought that was funny that those operations where trimmed from the interface because I was a farm admin.  After some investigation, I found that you need to be a member of the local Administrators group on the WFE servers in order for you to see those links.  I asked the client to include me in the local admin group, and voila, those operations showed up.