Randy -

I have not yet worked in a DBA role (except for a development "DBA" role where I was really more of a developer who helped with some DBA duties) where I did not have at least Local Administrator rights. Very rare to have domain admin rights (and to be quite honest I don't want them and I don't want my systems folks to want me to be a Domain Admin just like I don't want to keep BUILTIN\ADMINISTRATORS in the server where all the systems folks can "play" with my production SQL Servers).

I can't speak for everyone out there but I think it is more common than not for a DBA to be a local admin of a SQL box.