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There are two closely related issues here:

I would expect this command to succeed as a non root user?

  $ service httpd status
  httpd dead but subsys locked

If that's not possible fair enough.
But the issue is compounded by...


...the init script return code is incorrect:

  $ echo $?
  2

http://refspecs.linuxbase.org/LSB_3.1.1/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/iniscrptact.html
states that "2" means the service is dead.
In this case "4" should be returned so that status
for this service can be presented correctly.

I have checked httpd initscript and it uses "status" function from /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions (from package "initscripts") and returns its return code.

This function checks if the /var/run/httpd/httpd.pid exists, but /var/run/httpd directory has mode 0710, so as a user, you are not allowed to read its content. status function in /etc/init.d/functions should probably check for this case and return 4. I think this should be filed as a bug against initscripts package.

I will ask Joe Orton, if it's possible change the /var/run/httpd permissions to allow users reading the PID file. I don't see any reason why not to do that (and lot of daemons do that), but maybe I'm missing something...

We put other stuff in /var/run/httpd - AF_UNIX sockets notably (mod_cgid, mod_wsgi, etc).  I'm not sure it's a actively harmful... do we guarantee that the status command works as non-root?  What do the SELinux rules enforce?

Lacking any strong motivation I don't think we should change this.  I don't think we could or should guarantee that the "status" command will work properly for non-root users in all cases; there may well be many exceptional cases which we couldn't anticipate.  systemd addresses this issue properly.