[@selise Participant 14 years, 2 months ago]

i have yet to test this, but it appears that the answer to my question above is ‘yes’…. with the plugin bbPress Topics for Posts by David Dean:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-post-topics/changelog/

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-bbpress-topics-for-posts-export-post-comments-to-new-topic