For obvious reasons such as design, testing and debugging you do have access to all components in a development/test/UAT/sandbox instance. However, Production is locked down and you can only request the Microsoft Support team through LifeCycle Services site and support tickets to do anything on Production such as deploying changes, taking ad-hoc backups, requesting a restore, refreshing it with a golden image for your setup environment before golive, etc.
Also at conferences it has been mentioned multiple times that Microsoft is now managing Production, and is locked down - only their support team members could get access initiated by you via a support incident.
There might be documentation on it, but this is the one I could find after a quick search as a hint about the lockdown:
For production environments, customers must use LCS to submit a request to the Service Engineering team to apply packages.