Gotcha, well I've traced the error to a call to ap_run_open_htaccess inside
apache itself.  getuid() returns 33 (www-data) right before this call, on
the local filesystem this call returns APR_ENOTDIR and on the remote
filesystem it returns APR_EACCES.  The document root directory has 700
permissions and is owned by uid 43959 in both cases so I'm not sure how uid
33 would be able to access it locally.  I'm guessing something else is
going on but this was as far as I was able to trace it, I can't find the
definition for ap_run_open_htaccess() anywhere in the source