I'm not invested in the Apple ecosystem any more. Is this true? Being trying to find a link to some authoritative info on this but haven't thus far.
Do you mean this? http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/it/management.html
I see no mention of being able to side-load apps.
Business use a dev license, then deploy their own apps via side-loading. Standard practice by now. And "own" apps is becoming a very loose definition, 3rd party develops, then signs with corp key.
(Really, you do have sysadmin access, if you care enough. My iPhone has a profile on it put there by my [big, enterprise-y] employer, which gives them the ability to do pretty much whatever they want—including side-loading applications. I'm surprised nobody has used the "corporate-owned device" method to build an App store yet.)