Rob's explanation is correct. Here's the background:

The question about the tests being skipped is that you have to run an extra setup step as root, in order to exercise some of the code paths that are hit when you just can't remove things because they don't belong to you, and you lack the privileges.

It's there for mainly for improving the code coverage of the test suite, and just cannot be done in an automated fashion (e.g. "please type in root's password so that I can go and do stuff" is not gonna fly).