OK, so I have made it through the first week and I haven't gone insane. I've managed to work around any issues I had. One of the biggest annoyances was the fact that when I removed my rights a lot of my settings switched back to their defaults - power management specifically. I tend to turn off most of the power management for my laptop and change the power button to do a hibernate. So I had to get into that as the Administrator to get it the way I wanted.
I'm thinking that the key thing here is that whilst developers probably shouldn't always run as admin (I'm starting to sound like an ex-smoker) all the time, they will from time to time need to get in and change things on the machine, so they do need a way to get those admin rights when they need them.