Well here's the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the styling of the comments that look so similar to Wordpress...

Author Highlight. Just like with Wordpress, people on wordpress.org were trying to figure out how to get the comments to highlight, and it was finally done by inserting a little code that would recognize the author and email, and that combination would call to the style.css and apply a unique border and background color on their box.

Do you think that's possible just by using the same code that works in the wordpress comments?

Otherwise, it'd be at it's best to be configured in the admin panel.

Ta da.

Well all that would be needed is for a class (say, "author_comment") to be attached to all author comments. The actual styling would then be the responsibility of the css.

So, I don't think the admin panel would be involved at any stage.