I think some things can be shown, but like mentioned previously, it's more of a "show run" then anything else.
I know when I did "show VLAN" at the group level for my controllers, it kicked back the VLANs on the MM only. That's where the "mdc" command comes in handy.
If you are using secureCRT, you can add buttons to the bottom which can execute both the "CD" command and the "MDC" one in one click so it will speed up the process. You can also log directly into a given controller via CLI and issue show commands, just not config commands unless you enable disaster-recovery mode.