Best answer: Can they provision a VM of Windows Server 2008 R2 for you where you can be a local Administrator and run BizTalk Server? Even the most security conscious environments I've been in allow this.
To address your specific question: No, you don't need to have local Administrator, but...there are a number of tasks during BizTalk DEV that require a very high level of privilege on the system, such as creating and managing Services, deploying/installing applications, managing the Global Assemble Cache and probably a few more.
So, by the time you get all the system rights to do these, you're pretty close to being a local Administrator anyway.
Either way, a VM is still the preferable option. Technically, it doesn't even have to be joined to a Domain so you'd really be in a sandbox.