There was another announcement recently as well pointing towards the summer 2009 plan, so it is probably more likely. We'll know more in Feb once they've had more chance to study the data from the incident.
While the same formulas won't hold for a metal, the same ideas will be true. Another example. When you sweat, your skin is cooled by the fact the water is vaporizing (evaporating) off of your skin. But of course your skin is far from 100C, however some of the water will still vaporize.
I don't know the specifics for lead, but there will still be some fraction of the lead that will vaporize off at well below 2000 degrees. If that fraction is big or so small that it doesn't matter is another point all together.
A thief walked into the headquarters of Chicage Public Schools (CPS) on Friday, April 6 and grabbed two laptops containing the names and social security numbers of 40,000 teachers. The CPS has released an image of the suspect captured by CCTV and is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the thief or recovery of the data.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"