Now this second point isn't relevant to the entire Drupal community, obviously, but it also makes a case for replacing the special user 1 entirely with a default 'administrative user' role that is assigned to user 1 and can then be assigned to other users.

I think creating an admin role, giving it all permissions (programmatically, not via teh checkboxes), then assigning user 1 to that role is the way to go for core Drupal.

It allows users to be granted/revoked admin privileges dynamically.