Regardless of whether or not you set a password, the first user you set up (or the only user if you only have one user on the machine) will be an sudo'er..it will probably just not prompt you for a password if one wasn't set.
If you set a password and then somehow set up autologin and then forgot the password then you'll need to do the boot in single user mode, remount / and change/set the root password dance probably.
BTW is there something wrong with your clock..you seem to have replied to my message before I sent it :)