In addition to being the default name for the admin group in Debian, the name has some history:
> [from slang ‘big wheel’ for a powerful person] A person who has an active wheel bit. “We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives.” The traditional name of security group zero in BSD (to which the major system-internal users like root belong) is ‘wheel’.
> The term was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes called wheel mode. This term entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites).
> [from slang ‘big wheel’ for a powerful person] A person who has an active wheel bit. “We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives.” The traditional name of security group zero in BSD (to which the major system-internal users like root belong) is ‘wheel’.
> The term was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes called wheel mode. This term entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites).
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/W/wheel.html