I might be ignorant of something going on behind the scenes here, but I noticed that there are several entries in /dev/ that are owned by my unprivileged user, crunge. For example, /dev/vcs[n] /dev/vcsa[n] /dev/video[n] /dev/vtx[n] /dev/winradio[n] /dev/audio /dev/dsp /dev/fb[n] /dev/fd0 ... where [n] is some number These are only a sample of the entries.
I suspect that what you're seeing is pam_console hard at work. When you log in at the system console as a non-root user, the pam_console module gives the user ownership of numerous devices (floppy drives, the local terminal, video capture cards, tuner cards, sound cards, etc.) which are reverted when the user logs out. More information on how pam_console works can be found in the pam_console(8) man page.