I took a look, and there's a /System/Library/Sandbox/rootless.conf that defines what is blocked. The first column is the process (or wildcard) which can edit files there. The second is what's blocked.
So the following is blocked: /System, /usr, /bin. But there are exceptions allowing access to /usr/local and a bunch of other things. Note at the bottom that /etc, /tmp, and /var are blocked, but those are only symlinks to the actual directories in /private. So you can still edit anything under those directories, you just cannot change the symlink itself.
Code:
/System
* /System/Library/Caches
booter /System/Library/CoreServices
* /System/Library/Extensions
/System/Library/Extensions/*
UpdateSettings /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.UpdateSettings.plist
* /System/Library/Speech
* /System/Library/User Template
/bin
dyld /private/var/db/dyld
/sbin
/usr
* /usr/libexec/cups
* /usr/local
* /usr/share/man
# symlinks
/etc
/tmp
/var