>It depends on how your group is structured. I don't think there is a hard or fast answer.

I have a hard time justifying a net admin installing SQL as many decisions that should be made during installation will require DBA knowledge, ie, features to install, "topography" (probably wrong word) for example replication, clustering etc.

But, I will tell you that by reading what you say and trying to answer I realized that it might not be as bad as I first thought, I think my main problem is that what the net admins want is to install and set up everything (even db creation, replication, everything), leaving the dba just with maintenance tasks, which I strongly feel is wrong, very very wrong