Question: I've gotten myself into a pickle, but perhaps there is still hope.

I've commented out the user "pi" while acting as root after typing the following: 
 nano etc/passwd

Saved and exited. Next I literally exit terminal. Now upon opening a new terminal window I get the following message: 
 I have no name!@raspberrypi ~ $

Any sudo command I type is returned with the following message:
 sudo: unknown uid #### who are you?

Thing is I still have ssh up on my macbook pro where I'm still logged in as root. Since I'm fairly new to the whole command line bit I figured I'd reach out for a bit a help.

Any ideas how to fix the pi without reinstalling??

Answer: 
This is not a huge problem, since the file can be edited like any text document. 

If you are at ssh and have root privileges, just nano /etc/passwd (i feel evil typing that haha), otherwise if there is another user with root privileges (other than pi) login in as them and edit the passwd file. 

If there are no other users, put your SD card in your mac and edit the file in any text editor.
I solved it by uncommenting the line that begins with `#pi 1000 1000` (something like that) in the file passwd (access it by typing nano/etc/paswwd) by erasing the `#`, when I did that, everything returns to normality and I was enable to use sudo commands again.