Funny enaugh, it is not always that simple. I seen cases where a:

select top 1 max(id)

outperformed

select max(id)

many times over, and I suspect top sometimes acts as a undocumented hint. I got some testing to do on it still, and if it pans out it might also be a trick to control table variables better by using top to provide an estimate other then the constant 1 and thus get better query plans. It could also be just a side effect of the optimizer assigning costs to each operation and in rare cases come to a different plan due to a slightly higher ** estimate ** of the costs. In any case, it does not hurt to test both methods if you see a query perform worse then you anticipated.