That's my understanding, DEZ.
On a physical piano, the dampers lift before the hammer is thrown, and then the hammer is out of contact with the mechanism once it reaches an 'escape velocity' (it escapes the escapement).
After hammer-strike, the dampers return as you release the key, but, unlike with the hammer-mechanism where the hammer 'escapes', the damper for each key is continuously controlled by that key. With this capacity, you can make the damper return quickly, slowly, partially, completely, or even cycle up and down depending upon how you control the key motion as you release the key with your finger. This is not modeled in Pianoteq, and would not be supported by the hardware of most keyboards (except for the ones that have continuous mechanical or laser/optical reading of each key's position).
So, in Pianoteq, if your sustain pedal is set to continuous, and your hardware sustain pedal supports continuous values, you can 'half-pedal' all the dampers at once. But on a real piano, you can individually 'half-pedal' each and every note - in Pianoteq you can not.
- David