Right, but in my case I have authors who need to be able to publish their own work - which as far as I can tell, only happens when I set the default to "Published" for the appropriate content types, since authors don't see the "Admin Options" that include "Publish" unless I give them free reign over the site ("administer nodes").
Yes currently this is not possible and I fear that the workflow module can't allow it to you. I don't know why this hasn't been made up to now, but I'm sure there's a lot of demand, so maybe you can investigate a little node module and if you feel confortable, submit patches to allow this kind of permissions.
That's something I wanted for a long time (http://drupal.org/node/13129), but I never took the time to investigate it. My idea was to add some permissions as do flexinode : - per role - per node type - per vocabulary - per status (only authorized a role to pass a node from unpublished to published, then other get the right to promote to fron page...) - create others kind of status node (first draft, work copy... whatever ;) )
Well, now that I know better the Drupal internals, that seems not so difficult, but I didn't take the time to investigate the UI, and with so much permission, it can be pretty tricky.
Good luck for your investigation, feel free to contact me, and I hope you can get it.
Regards
Nicolas