Actually figured this out. Ends up I was following the Alfresco documentation to closely which if memory serves said you had to define a group or groups in the Site that could create sites. Didn't mention Admins always can. Anyway, once I removed someone as admin was surprised to still see SharePoint type implementation of this. The Create Site still existed, a user could still enter the data, but when they saved it they got a really nasty java error that somewhere on the second line included an access denied text.
If it was me, and this is what I'll be continuing to do on my site, I will define a group who has the privledges to create sites and only show the create site option should they be in this group. Right now I'm only doing admins because that applies to me, however for a general application deployment I know that can't be assumed hense the suggestion to create a site creation Alfresco group.
JR