Missing updated features?

[Adam Dershowitz]

I am running 2.0.3 and have been for a while.  I had done all the recent upgrades to Macports by just doing sudo port selfupdate.  
But, I see that there are two features, that I believe were added with the jump to 2.0 that don't seem to be active.  
One is that I still need sudo to run all my macports commands.  I believe that this should no longer be necessary.  
Two is that I am using OS 10.6.8, yet I have never seen a binary download.  I still always download source and then it builds.  
So my question is whether the above two should be set by default?  Is there something that I have to do to turn on these two options?  Does doing a selfupdate not create the new macport user?  Does that have to be done manually or some other way?  
My macport config file is probably very old.  I have gone through a lot of different Mac OS versions along the way.  Each time I did follow the migration guide and reinstall my ports, but I am not sure if I have ever done anything with the config.  

thanks,

--Adam