In addition to being the default name for the admin group in Debian, the name has some history:

> [from slang ‘big wheel’ for a powerful person] A person who has an active wheel bit. “We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives.” The traditional name of security group zero in BSD (to which the major system-internal users like root belong) is ‘wheel’.

> The term was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes called wheel mode. This term entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites).

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/W/wheel.html

The wheel group is just a regular user group, its just the name Debian gives the group with admin permissions.

It's no different to any other user group on linux systems and you could replace the name wheel with admin, freethinker, systemdestroyer or whatever else you wanna call it.

Not really! In modern Linux specifically it's just a regular user group, but it's the de-facto standard name of the "administrator" group - users who can escalate to root privileges.

You might not even have wheel anymore; Debian just calls it "sudo" now.