Once a *nix system is properly configured and hardened, is it a conceivable strategy to remove all super user/root users? Are there benefits to removing root from a system altogether to prevent super-user privilege escalation exploits altogether?

Edit: More to the point: Can super user (root, uid=0 or otherwise) be replaced entirely with a capability based system? 

Even if you wanted to, I don't think you can remove the root user. From Wikipedia:


  On Unix-like systems, for example, the user with a user identifier (UID) of zero is the superuser, regardless of the name of that account.


and a lot of the kernel code that vulnerabilities exploit does stuff like

// become root
uid = 0;
...
if (uid == 0)
    // do some protected thing


So the superuser isn't really a "user account", it's literally the number 0. If you can find an exploit to set uid = 0 then bam! your process has sudo, regardless of whether or not there's a user account named "root".

EDIT ADDRESSING COMMENTS: several flavours of linux prepend a "!" to the root's password in the /etc/shadow password file (a character that can not be generated with the password hashing function) which makes it impossible to actually log in as root. That stops some types of root-priviledge escalation attacks based on cracking the root password, but the more dangerous kind of privilege-escalations are based on buffer-overflow attacks that over-write a process' uid variable to be uid=0, at which point that process is root.
