What are you claiming was improved compared to Win2K? As far as I can remember everything after that was dumbed-down UI and pointless security clickthroughs.
7 disabled a lot of the security prompts for usability. It didn't remove them, it actually just automatically approved them. These days, most software doesn't need admin privileges anymore. You could always turn off all of the prompts if you wanted to, I think there were 4 levels of prompt severity?